8 thoughts on “Dementia”

  1. In other good news on the brain front, a tapeworm drug (niclosamide) you can buy at a farmer’s feed store stops the zika virus from replicating and is already approved for use by pregnant women.

    Nature medicine paper

    You can buy a course of niclosamide on eBay for about $25.00

    It might be way to early in the studies to try for such a thing, but given a choice between taking an unnecessary treatment for non-existent tapeworms and having the potential of permanent cognitive limitations from zika, I’d go for the cheap drug.

    The other drug the paper mentions that helps protect neurons from death is still in the early human experimental phase for treating liver cirrhosis, so it won’t be available for quite a long time.

  2. The link I wanted to post was to a story at Quanta magazine about infection tolerance. A part at the end makes me think low doses of radiation may increase infectious disease tolerance since some DNA damaging drugs do that in animals.

      1. Reading the 2013 paper the article was referring to I see they did try gamma irradiation and it did have a protective effect in their mouse model of sepsis.

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