This is really exciting, but would these RASC cells only affect emphysema COPD subtype? There's the other branch (chronic bronchitis), and the millions afflicted with asthma whose main struggle is airway narrowing/hardening/hyperresponsiveness - it doesn't sound from this overview that it would likely help, but any advance we can make in our cellular understanding of pulmonary disease is hugely important.
Whats not liked about this study is its sponsored by a company that makes K2-MK7 aka Kappa Bioscience. Personally Kappa should have used K1 in powder form, injecting vitamin K is a big no no like most things designed to be consumed orally!
So K1 is probably the best form to take 50mg will see your lungs relax or reduce tightness within 30mins. K2-MK4 is best for directing the calcium to the bones so whilst you can use 20mg of K2-MK4 as a sleeping pill in hard water (calcium rich) area's its taking the calcium out of the blood stream so calcium cant bind with adrenaline, because when they do, combined they have an even greater stimulating effect. The longer K2-MKx chains can be reduced down into short K2-MKx eg K2-MK7 can be reduced down to K2-MK4, and K1 is converted into K2-MK4 when its been through the Rough Endoplasmic Reticulum, so to keep calcium out of the blood stream and direct it to the bones use K2-MK4, to keep clacium out of tissue like elastic fibre's in lungs use K1. A combination of the both wont do any harm either, but K2-MK4 I would only take just before bed as it can help keep you very relaxed during the day and possibly could be used a mild sedative for highly strung people!
Choline (bitartrate/(CDP/citi)choline) lowers the pressure in the alveoli so the gas exchange takes place more easily, so your CO2 can escape and O bee absorbed more easily.
N Acetyl Cysteine helps the metallothionein so MgSOD in particular but also Cu/ZSOD (Super Oxide Dismutase) can help alleviate inflammation in the lungs which will reduce the excessive destruction of surrounding "healthy" cells caused by the immune system. We cant orally absorb L-Cysteine easily, but NAC we can absorb nearly 100% of. 1gram can see phlegm production and a mild reduction in lung tightness within 30mins even when smokers lungs are no longer "productive" ie chucking out phlegm.
Histidine precursor for histamine which helps white blood cells move through tissue, can also help reduce inflammation.
Increasing copper above the former 2mg RDA can help with Cu/ZSOD and copper will help increase Interleukin-2 which is one of the things used in chemo, although I note the science suggesting its best injected into tumours whilst ignoring the fact that penicillin based antibiotics help reduce copper in the body when its metabolised into penicillamine used for copper toxicity and Wilson's Disease. Not helped by Copper RDA being reduced from 2mg to below 1mg recently, perhaps the Cancer industry is extremely lucrative!
Iron in state 2 ie ferrous iron in low gram amounts for short term 1-2weeks can also help increase myoglobin which stores, iron, oxygen and Carbon Monoxide in the muscles, this can also help reduces panic in people. An enzyme in the gut which absorbs Iron Oxide (ferric or state3 iron) is rather limited, but an excess of ferrous iron can see iron diabetes and increase the chance of spontaneous internal haemorrhaging which is why new borns get a vit K shot instead of giving the mother vit K supplements at the first signs of the birth.
I'm not qualified in nothing (one up from living on the street) so this is just my opinion as curriculum's and examinations are political agenda's.
From my very basic understanding as an interested electronic engineer, while symptomatically pulmonary for the most part, COVID is a largely cardiovascular disease. Medical professionals please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read that the most dangerous symptom, pneumonia, stems from fluid leaking into the lungs due to dilation of the blood vessels, along with causing joint pain, loss of taste and smell, and swollen limbs.
COVID's most dangerous symptom is a condition called cytokine storm[1].
Cytokines are molecules used by the immune system as a means for communication, such as calling for help, cell destruction and more.
COVID creates a "storm" of signals, driving the immune system crazy. As a part of the immune system reaction to those signals, inflammation can occur (as a way to isolate and fight a specific infected zone).
During this attack, the immune system sends out cells from the blood and into the organs[2], making the blood vessels more permeable. I'm not certain but I believe that's the cardiovascular symptoms you're referring to.
From my even more basic understanding, the "vascular" part comes from covid affection for epithelial cell receptors, epithelial cells being about everywhere in your body (that's why it can propagate from nose to brain). I assumed the liver had similar tissue lining it's entry points.
I'm trying to understand our comment and failing. When I get a common cold or flu, of which I have had hundreds in my 4 decades of life, I don't think I once ended up with organ scarring. What are you on?
Just because you don't think you've had organ scarring doesn't mean you haven't. The difference is that most people don't worry about organ damage that is mostly negligible and never talked about. You don't automatically get diagnosed with a chronic disease in the presence of the smallest amount of scar tissue on any one organ and with (one number I found suggesting) 40% of industrial nations deaths having fibrosis as a contributing factor, you can bet that many people have organ scarring that is negligible.
It's hard for me to see "X gets more funding" as something to celebrate. Funding is essentially zero sum so that just means something else is now less funded as a consequence.
I hope you are wrong about <50%, but you may be right. I'd be curious as to a reasonable lower bound of human knowledge about human biology; do we know at least 25% of the fundamentals?
So I’d actually disagree. I think we know most of the fundamental principles of biology. The basic ideas underlying genome replication, RNA expression, and protein translation are very well understood. These are the core defining processes of life and we’ve basically figured out their most important, most highly conserved interactions.
The trick with biology is figuring out how these processes are controlled. Every aspect of cellular behavior has absolutely enormous combinatorial complexity. Take the EGFR protein for example. Its a receptor protein that seems to be important in controlling growth of cells. The EGFR protein has (I believe) at least twenty different locations that it can be modified. Each modification changes it’s shape and the other proteins that it can interact with. Each combination of interactions, in fact. So this one protein has at least a million different possible variants. Then consider that there are at least 20k different human genes and there are many many different ways that interactions between proteins, genes, and RNA are modified and regulated. Again, all the fundamental processes are understood, like we understand how EGFR gets modified. These processes are combined and remixed in an absolutely astronomically huge variety of ways.
A big problem right now in biology is the framing of these fundamentals in education. We know some things, but they're typically presented fairly piecewise in higher education.
One example of the fragmentation:
You're in an oncology lab? - study this particular protein and DNA damage association - but cell cycle is downplayed. Or vice versa. There's a lot of segmentation that goes on when the processes are really part of the same system.
In terms of fundamentals, I think we really need to switch towards starting biology education with just the pieces of the minimally viable cell. By using this as a tool to base everything upon, we can make biology a bit more scientific, rather than just the list of observations that it tends to swing towards today.
Doctors used to be one of the wisest, most educated people in a small community where they likely knew everyone. They took their little black bag to your home and got to see how you lived, which gave them vast quantities of knowledge about what ailed you without having to ask a bunch of questions -- more info, in fact, than questions would yield.
Then we invented modern tests and everyone goes to the office or hospital where their machinery is and we get treated like specimens in a petri dish, not like products of our environment and lifestyle.
This is the crux or what's wrong with modern medicine. Also, some doctors don't bother to keep up with new developments in their industry.
You're a bit downvoted, but I agree with your point. Wish that doctors and those in the medical field had a bit a more humility about the complexity of the human body.
From everything we know so far it seems there is no part of the body that is not able to heal to some extent, unless that part has been completely removed, (and even then the body is able to make amends somehow; there was a story on HN some months ago about how cut off fingers are able to regenerate in some cases). Now the rate of healing might be very slow, but the healing is real.
> Wish that doctors and those in the medical field had a bit a more humility about the complexity of the human body.
This is pretty silly to me. All medical knowledge can potentially be proven wrong. Are doctors supposed to add an asterisk to every single thing they say?
They are supposed to not discount verifiable information just because it goes against dogma. In particular, they should be careful not to suggest to patients that certain damage to the body is always permanent and thus there is nothing they can do to promote their own healing.
In any case I should have made clear that I was referring mostly to researchers, not your run of the mill practicing doctor.
to me this unsurprising. we have decades of evidence showing full recovery from years of sinking at various stages of life. Obviously regeneration is present
The question isn’t whether or not regeneration is a thing (cell themselves die and spawn a new), but how, where, why… all the actual details of a complete understanding.
And even with regeneration what’s the price paid in telomere shortening? Granted I’d rather regenerate and live healthy at the cost of a few years of extra life with barely usable lungs.
