I’m pretty sure young starving people do not spontaneously develop Alzheimer’s. (Admittedly I haven’t looked into that question, but I sure do expect I would have heard of starvation as a model for Alzheimer’s if it were true.)
On this model, I don’t see any reason for Alzheimer’s to be mainly correlated with age. (Note that whatever the connection is between Alzheimers and age, it has to be an absolutely ginormous effect size which completely swamps approximately-everything else. We’re not talking some third-order effect of a relatively-small age-related shift in the microbiome.)
Young people forget important stuff, get depressed, struggle to understand the world. That is the prediction of my model: that a bad gut microbiome would cause more neural pruning than is strictly optimal.
It is well documented that starving young people have lower IQ’s, I believe? Certainly the claim does not seem prima facie ridiculous to me.
The older you get, the more chances you have to develop a bad gut microbiome. Perhaps the actual etiology of bad gut microbiomes (which I do not claim to understand) is heavily age-correlated. Or maybe we simply do not label neural pruning induced by fake starvation perceptions as Alzheimer’s in the absence of old age.
Note that the Alzheimer’s gut microbiome have induced Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in young healthy mice by transferring something (tissue?) from the brain of human Alzheimer’s patients to the stomach of young healthy mice; thus, I consider this particular claim (young people can get Alzheimer’s) to have heavy empirical validation, if only in animal models.
Problems:
I’m pretty sure young starving people do not spontaneously develop Alzheimer’s. (Admittedly I haven’t looked into that question, but I sure do expect I would have heard of starvation as a model for Alzheimer’s if it were true.)
On this model, I don’t see any reason for Alzheimer’s to be mainly correlated with age. (Note that whatever the connection is between Alzheimers and age, it has to be an absolutely ginormous effect size which completely swamps approximately-everything else. We’re not talking some third-order effect of a relatively-small age-related shift in the microbiome.)
Young people forget important stuff, get depressed, struggle to understand the world. That is the prediction of my model: that a bad gut microbiome would cause more neural pruning than is strictly optimal.
It is well documented that starving young people have lower IQ’s, I believe? Certainly the claim does not seem prima facie ridiculous to me.
The older you get, the more chances you have to develop a bad gut microbiome. Perhaps the actual etiology of bad gut microbiomes (which I do not claim to understand) is heavily age-correlated. Or maybe we simply do not label neural pruning induced by fake starvation perceptions as Alzheimer’s in the absence of old age.
Note that the Alzheimer’s gut microbiome have induced Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in young healthy mice by transferring something (tissue?) from the brain of human Alzheimer’s patients to the stomach of young healthy mice; thus, I consider this particular claim (young people can get Alzheimer’s) to have heavy empirical validation, if only in animal models.
https://alzheimergut.org/research/ is the place to look for all the lastest research from the gut microbiome hypothesis community.