[ExI] good bexarotene article

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Isabelle Hakala
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2012 1:00 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] good bexarotene article

 

>.How difficult would it be to find someone with Alzheimer AND the
particular type of cancer that it is used for... that seems as though there
must be SOMEONE out there... and odds are they would be willing to take it
for their cancer... esp if it might help their Alzheimers... Seems as though
that would be an easy enough test. It isn't like they would say 'oh... you
can't take this drug for your cancer because it might help your Alzheimers
too, and that would be experimenting'.

-Isabelle




 

 

Ooooh good thinking, thanks Isabelle.  It should be easy to find cancer
patients with Alzheimer's.  The question now at hand is if that information
about their medical history is available.

This goes back to a discussion we had here a dozen years ago.  There should
be a database somewhere, where people can dump medical information, while
stripping out identities, so that we can find this kind of signal in the
noise.  I am surprised something like that doesn't exist somewhere.  We
could maintain patient privacy while still perhaps filtering out these
oddball correlations: a certain type of cancer patient doesn't seem to get
Alzheimer's or has a lower rate than the general population.  The signal
could have been sitting there for years, undiscovered because we have no
systematic way to find it among the deep piles of data, hidden away to
maintain patient privacy.  

Perhaps if we had a group of volunteers who are willing to dump everything
about their medical history on the web, that might help.  I would sign up,
but my medical history is pretty boring: one kidney stone 15 years ago, and
nothing else has ever gone wrong.

spike 

 

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