Comment by lithocarpus
11 hours ago
Interesting.
So, one could make a similar article saying "Myocardial infarction may be caused by sugar consumption" and support it by analyzing the recent diet of 200 people who died of heart disease and finding that 95% of them recently consumed a lot of sugar.
This study's main contribution was to identify the specific bacteria, which gives insight into the mechanism behind heart attacks (the antibody the researchers developed was one of their central contributions). So the researchers dissected only people who died of heart disease.
I think a population study to assess the odds ratios of a risk factor on people who die of heart disease vs not would be valuable (but is a very different beast).
> So, one could make a similar article saying "Myocardial infarction may be caused by sugar consumption" (...
One could apply the same flawed logic to claim that propensity for myocardial infarction may cause certain bacterial infections.
I might be reading parts of it wrong, but I think that's a different sort of thing to the research in the article.
Sugar is a very indirect cause of heart attacks, everyone knows that most heart attacks are a culmination of decades of diet and exercise habits. It's still worth researching everything to do with that, but it's pretty low value research because it's hard to draw any actionable conclusions from it other than "eat healthier and exercise", which is already well known.
The research in the article is talking about a direct cause. Bacteria exists on arterial plaque, viral infection triggers bacteria to multiply, something about that process causes the plaque to detach and cause a heart attack. If that ends up being a rock solid cause and effect, even for a subset of heart attacks, that could lead to things like direct prevention (anti-virals before the heart attack happens) or changes in patient management (everyone with artery disease gets put far away from sick patients) that could directly and immediately save a lot of lives.
The post you replied to was saying that the data from the study isn't as strong as the article and headline make it out to be, which is usually the case. For this one though I'm reading that less as "it's a nothingburger" and more as "it's a small interesting result that needs a lot of follow up".
While you're not technically wrong, I find this whole approach to be not good.
And actually, if as a lot of science is now suggesting, inflammation and damage due to eating oxidization-prone lipids (aka refined oils) in combination with refined sugar is a big part of the cause of arterial damage and heart disease, that could be easily be the biggest root cause in most of these cases. The bacteria if they even play a causal role at any point, could be a result of previous damage due to diet (and lack of exercise).
The paper's idea of treating heart disease by giving patients antibiotics seems really problematic to me. Destroy your health with poor diet and lack of exercise, and then once you start to feel the effect of this, take antibiotics and destroy your gut health too.
Are there any human randomised control trials that show stuff like vegetable oil cause inflammation? Atleast the ones I've seen show the opposite
https://youtu.be/-xTaAHSFHUU
While do do agree with the general premise of your comment, that is, correct the root cause. For some, "eat healthy and exercise", may not be an option, because they are already addicted and overweight. At least, taking anti-biotics could be the very first line of actionable treatment to prevent the bacterial buildup and save their life immediately.
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Try it and see where you get, since you assume these scientists are so foolish.
Isn’t it obvious that a heart attack could be caused by a myriad of issues? Sure a bacteria could be a cause. So could be genetics, or an excess of cheeseburgers. A heart ceasing to pump blood effectively is not a singular cause
> Isn’t it obvious that a heart attack could be caused by a myriad of issues?
I think you not only missed the point but also are doubling down on your mistake by conflating correlation with causality. You don't conclude that burger craving is caused by owning a car by observing drive-through restaurants.