3 thoughts on “A Heart Attack?”

  1. I wonder if this dovetails with Bret Weinstein’s theory about the prevalence of cardiac damage from modern drugs due to evolutionary pressures in lab mice breeding. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard northern Italy had significant comorbidity with people who were on a certain blood pressure med. We could be reaping the whirlwind now of decades of relying on a monoculture for developing our medicines.

  2. Turns out the majority of lab mice used in medical trials were/are bred by a single lab. Since mice have a childhood where they don’t have babies, various selection pressures selected for long-lived mice. Interestingly, this presented as unusually long telomeres. The punchline: lab mice almost inevitably die of cancer because they have not built-in cell life limit; but on the other hand they are very resistant to toxins because they can endlessly regenerate damaged cells. This tends to manifest in heart damage in humans because the heart does not regenerate well (which is the other side of the coin for why heart cancer is almost unheard of), and comparative toxicity studies using lab mice will not find this effect because their heart cells do regenerate.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s is where I heard about it but you have to get through a bunch of family, academic, and other politics to get to the point unfortunately, but if you start at 45 minutes it’s minimized.

    There’s a bunch of questions begged by the theory, but if long telomeres have the regenerative (and oncogenerative) impact on organisms he suggests then it’s obvious that any research done on animals like that is… not quite useless, but very questionable in some very specific ways including toxicity to heart tissue.

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