If the Mounjaro weight loss drug is $1,000/month, this has to be worth at least $10,000/month.
intercst
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Ah! “Slow physical decline”. So the “JCs” can squeeze more work out of people!
Remember “Bull” Randleman, from “Band of Brothers”? Came across an article a couple days ago, about how he died. He was 82. Went in the hospital for an AV graft, to prepare him for dialysis. He was then discharged to a for-profit nursing home, for a 30 day recovery. Thirty days later, he was brought in to the doc for a followup for the surgery. The wound was massively infected. The bacteria had gotten into his bloodstream. Bull died shortly after.
His family sued the nursing home operator for not detecting and treating the infection. You know, “nursing”, like you would expect in a “nursing home”.
Thing is, in Arkansas, non-economic damages are capped at $500,000, and, since Bull was retired, he was deemed to have no economic value, so the $500K was all the family got for the nursing home’s negligence.
Steve
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Really like that New Atlas site…doc
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A dead give away that we’re being treated to an infomercial/Science By Press Release insight here is the opening sentence in the article…" For the first time, scientists have demonstrated…" and further on in the article…“In a pre clinical mouse model …”
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I can’t imagine that is why doc likes New Atlas…
Pete
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I like it for the interesting articles that I saw. I didn’t read the article on aging however. The solar article, pod camper, drone using bee/ant tracking, robot brick laying was good reading so thanks intercst…doc
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Fair enough - the 34 page linked Nature article is a bit beyond my ken so I was thinking maybe you or VeeEnn had some opinion on the analysis and results.
Pete
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Well, the interesting thing about reading interesting articles is that oftentimes what one individual finds interesting and persuasive, others might notice is a bit, well…dodgy.
Years ago…decades, in fact…I was sitting with colleagues over lunch one Tuesday and we got to discussing this phenomenon a bit after a comment on an article in the Science section of the NYT (how I know it was a Tuesday) One of us, after reading one topic was “How come these Science writers always seem to get anything to do with dentistry wrong?” (a relevant question for a bunch of dentists to ponder) After a bit of back and forth on the topic, I piped up with my 2c…“Well, maybe they get most things wrong and we just don’t realise because we’re dentists and not…”
As you can imagine…or witness for yourselves 
…such an observation received quite a bit of pushback along the lines of folk defending their own reading comprehension and critical thinking skills to various degrees. Anyway, over the next few weeks, we all had reminders of this convo as topics came up that various of my cronies knew about…volcanology, birding and, coincidentally, exercise science/physiology (of interest to me) All interesting and almost right…but for one or two examples, obvious only to someone who knew, that were so wrong that it was obvious that the writer concerned was enough of an ignoramus to make the article worthless as a piece of science communication.
This would’ve been around the time I discovered Ben Goldacre (and his excellent column in The Grauniad…Bad Science) and a few other actual medical journalists who were concerned enough to be taking this cause seriously. It was also around the time that the fertilizer was starting to hit the fan about Andrew Wakefield’s now retracted study and the popular press’s promotion of the erroneous link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He (Fakefield) promoting the notion of brave, maverick doctor vs The Establishment and that he was the very first to show this link.
Well, given the “first time” and rodent research double whammies, I know better than to even bother even on a topic where I know enough to know I…or the authors…might be wrong.
That’s the thing to remember about “research” and publication, it’s not primarily intended as entertainment/edutainment (call it what you will) but an effort to “open the books” to peer review…where the peers are other scientists with knowledge, skill and expertise (a potential curse word these days…hope TMF’s nanny filter approves it) in the topic. So any gaffes are pointed out for either correction or research that can be ignored.
Here’s another article where they injected rodents with an antibody to IL 11 and they recorded the results. One thing I could not find is an article where they measure IL 11 levels in humans comparing young people to senior citizens. This could be real interesting because in rodents the suppression of IL 11 with antibodies resulted in longer living healthier rodents who had less cancer and mental decline. I don’t know if big pharm wants us to live healthier personally…doc
edit: Anti-inflammatory drug extended the lifespan of mice by 20 per cent | New Scientist
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It is a pretty impressive paper from what I can see. IL-11 is a protein involved in inflammation. It increases in levels as humans and mice age. Inhibiting or eliminating IL-11 leads to increased muscle mass and decreased visceral fat in older mice. Metabolism increased. Telomere lengths and mitochondria numbers were preserved with age.
The evidence that this might work in humans is the following. In humans, IL-11 activates another protein called ERK-mTOR. When human cell lines were given activated ERK-mTOR, they showed signs of increased aging/senescense. In another study, human cells were either treated with an antibody that inhibited IL-11 or to a control antibody. The cells treated with the control showed reduced metabolism, shorter telomeres, and reduced mitochondria numbers over time. Cells with inhibited IL-11 remained similar to young cells in these phenotypes.
This is pretty exciting stuff for those who want to live longer and healthier. Certainly exciting if you are a rodent and very possibly for other mammals, including hairless apes.
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Some time back, I watched an old ep of “Columbo”, where the perp, a dentist, knocked off the guy his wife was playing hide the salami with. I had serious doubts it would work, mostly because I know a permanent crown does not come off as easily as shown in the ep. I asked my dentist about it. He agreed that was wrong, and also that the active compound would not leak out of the crown as depicted. He was sufficiently interested to ask what the perp had used in the crown. I happened to remember, digitalis. He agreed, that would do the job, if it did leak out of the crown as depicted.
Steve
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They laughed at Pfizer’s boner pills (l.e., Viagra) right up until FDA approval.
Obviously, this is some years away from a human drug, but if Eli Lilly gets a hold of it, it will be on the market in half the time.
intercst
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Sometimes the anti-establishment doctors get it right. One Australian doctor has a Nobel Prize in Medicine to show for it.
When Dr. Marshall’s results were published in the early 1980’s, Tagamet and Pepcid were among the most profitable drugs being sold. There was tremendous push back by the for-profit drug industry on the idea that you could cure an ulcer with a 2 week course of a cheap antibiotic. Dr. Marshall was ridiculed as a fraud.
intercst
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That’s right. Cures are “business killers”, but a $10,000/month product that you need to take for the remainder of your life, Big Pharma can get behind. {{ LOL }}
intercst
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Yes. Dentistry is rife with these sorts of stories…usually involving a temporary restoration. So many, I reckon that the dentist would head the perp list every time.
My husband had a convoluted story…just waiting for his retirement and time to write it…involving liver transplants and HepC in some way. Well, retirement is sort of here 
but guess what…the bloody pharmaceutical industry came along with Harvoni and other direct acting anti virals and robbed him of his idea of riches beyond the dreams of avarice. His textbooks on portal hypertension and alcohol and the liver are going to be it, I guess.
Well, Boehringer Ingelheim started clinical development of an IL11 inhibitor last year for treatment of fibrotic diseases - as someone with a pulmonary autoimmune disease causing fibrosis in my lungs, that alone is of great interest to me. Living a longer, healthier life on top of that would naturally be even better.
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Except his anti establishment persona is a story that he’s directed the narrative on. Although he does aim for the Galileo gambit, he actually didn’t get tremendous pushback he implies. Quite the reverse.
At the time (early 1980s) there were, in fact plenty of effective anti ulcer drugs on the market…even predating the introduction of Zantac and Tagamet. The problem with them was the rate of relapse…something like 80% within 2 years. The stumbling blocks with Warren (who’d been in the field for years) and his young sidekick were the difficulty in explaining how a bacterium could survive so well in that inhospitable environment (pH of the stomach) and actually growing the little bugger in vitro. Once they’d grown it and Baz had guzzled it (giving himself a mild gastritis, BTW, not ulcer disease), obviously folk went off to do a bit of fact checking…like you should per the Scientific Method…and lo, it was demonstrably reproducible and solved the problem of recurrent disease. It got Marshall a hugely prestigious professorship here in the US at an unbelievably young age. Likewise the Nobel Prize. Certainly not the rap sheet of someone who could rightly claim “They’re all against me”
It was quite right to ask “is there another explanation” since this work did support the use of an antibiotic on quite a wide scale. Certainly not the thing to be done if h. pylori were a mere innocent bystander given both the side effects and potential for resistance with heavy use (metronidazole was the recommended antibiotic and over quite a long course of treatment) I guess Google might help you check these issues 
A perfect example of how easy it is to be duped if you’re following a glorified press release.
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Actually I did follow this in the business press in the back in the 1980’s since I’d already sold my Exxon stock and was redeploying the money in the Tech and Drug industries. I can confirm a lot of ridicule prior to the “prestigious professorship at a young age” and the Nobel Prize. {{ LOL }}
intercst
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Aah. I was following the story also. At the time my husband was still doing far more general GI so he/I were following the story…in the scientific literature and from a fundamental understanding of pharmacology, physiology and whatnot. For sure, the idea was not deemed particularly plausible…which prompted so many to go off and attempt to falsify/refute the data. And fail. I guess that accounts for the different perspectives?