The Latest on Healthcare Research

Q3 2024 Update

A reminder that my course on how you can become a fantastic communicator will start in two weeks, on Monday November 4th. Enroll here!

I’ve been collecting news about healthcare developments over the last quarter:

• The cost of respiratory viruses

• How we can solve them

• More cancer cures

• GLP-1 wonderdrugs

• Does metformin reduce aging?

• What interventions work?

• How can we accelerate aging research?

• Reversing diabetes

• Communication during our sleep

• AI is accelerating and will cure many diseases. 

• For example, we can now identify many cancers with high accuracy

• We’re also developing other great non-AI tools

• We can prevent HIV

• Antibiotics can cure African children

• More examples of bad healthcare regulation

• Should you shower?

• How to stop bleeding fast

Before we jump into it, I had a really fun, wide-ranging, interesting conversation with Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and creator behind the World of DaaS Podcast. We covered dozens of topics—some of which I’ve had thoughts about for some time but haven’t published anything about yet:

• How geography’s imprint on today’s world is much bigger than we think, and will be much smaller in the future.

• The geopolitical implications of cheap electricity: What will happen with countries like Saudi Arabia? What about African countries?

• Why wind and solar are complementary.

• Why is Argentina poor?

And more! You can listen to it here.

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Respiratory Viruses

The Cost of Respiratory Viruses

I grew up thinking colds were just a small annoyance to be suffered throughout life. The flu was just a bad cold.

Then COVID happened and, holy shit, 0.1-0.4% death rate for the flu is not something to… sneeze at.

Now I’m one week into the new school year. After three months of disease-free bliss, my four children and I are sick as dogs. Two years ago, I spent literally six months straight sick.

I expect my grandchildren to relate to respiratory illnesses like I relate to scurvy: “Wow, the past was awful and there is a historically contingent reason why it stayed that awful long after the tech tree would have supported eliminating this problem.”—Patrick McKenzie

I think we simply didn’t pay attention to minor viruses because of what I call the Scary Virus Paradox:

I originally shared it here

COVID corrected this attention deficit, which means we will probably solve this problem in the coming decades. We’re already seeing it:

Air purifiers in Finnish daycare reduced children's illnesses by 18% in a carefully controlled study. This implies huge potential for better public health and cost savings from sick leaves, with a simple intervention against airborne infections.

So let’s take a step back. How much is this costing us, really? Let’s take the US as an example. The average person loses about 1.5 days of work per year to respiratory viruses¹, and the average working day is worth about $280². So the average worker productivity lost is at least³ $420 per worker per year. Since there are about 145M full-time employees in the US⁴, that’s a total cost of $61B per year. Respiratory viruses cost us at least $61B/year in lost productivity, and that’s just in the US!! Which means that simply cleaning the air of childcare facilities could be worth $1.3B per year.⁵

So I want to see more research on ways to stop them, including vaccines and environmental interventions. 

Solutions to Respiratory Viruses

Luckily, we have some. From FastCo:

Early in the pandemic, researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital started trying to develop a new way to block respiratory infections. Now a newly published preclinical study suggests how well their product, a nasal spray, might work. ⁠

When someone who’s sick coughs or sneezes, they spray out tiny germ-filled droplets that others can breathe in through their nose. The new nasal spray, which coats the inside of the nose, is designed to burst the droplets and capture the pathogen in a strong, gel-like matrix. ⁠

In animal studies, the drug-free spray was 99.99% effective in stopping viruses and bacteria.⁠

A reduction of 10,000x in the transmissibility of nasal viruses means their elimination. Let’s hope this is true!

Cancers

More Cancer Cures from Adjacent Experts

You might recall the expert Dr Halassy who cured her own cancer. Reader Peter Braun pointed out the case of Richard Scoyler, an oncologist who fought melanomas with immunotherapy and who got a nasty brain glioblastoma. He treated it with the immunotherapy he knew, and then doctors extirpated his glioblastoma. Like Dr Halassy, he has been cancer-free for 10 months now—beyond the usual 6-month window.

And Cancer Cures from Social Media

This other woman claims that her advice cured somebody’s cancer:

I thought: “Surely this can’t be true or it would be known. Highly suspicious, don’t believe what you read on social media, 5% probability. Let me find the papers that disprove it”. 

So I looked it up and I could only find papers supporting it. 

But none of these studies are great. None are an RCT⁶ or show broad-based cancer reduction. And I wonder, why? This has been known as a potential cancer reducing element since the 90s. Why?

Maybe it’s because IP6, being naturally occurring, can’t be patented to fight cancer. As a supplement, it can’t claim it cures cancer. To sell it as a drug, it must have clinical trials behind it, but nobody has carried them out because they’re too expensive for something that can’t be monetized.

So we don’t have hard evidence. What does soft evidence say? From an AI that summarizes papers:

Inositol hexaphosphate (IP6), a naturally occurring compound in plants and mammalian cells, has shown promising anticancer properties in various experimental models (Vucenik & Stains, 2010; Matejuk & Shamsuddin, 2010). IP6 reduces cell proliferation, induces apoptosis and differentiation of malignant cells, and enhances natural killer cell activity (Vucenik & Stains, 2010). Its anticancer effects are attributed to its antioxidant properties, immune system enhancement, and interference with signal transduction pathways (Vucenik & Shamsuddin, 2006). IP6, especially when combined with inositol, has demonstrated synergistic effects with conventional chemotherapy, potentially improving treatment outcomes and quality of life for cancer patients (Vucenik & Shamsuddin, 2003). While preliminary studies in humans have shown promising results, full-scale clinical trials are needed to determine the effectiveness and safety of IP6 plus inositol at therapeutic doses (Vucenik & Shamsuddin, 2006; Vucenik & Shamsuddin, 2003).

This is promising, although note that Vucenik and Shamsuddin are all over the place here, so big grain of salt. 

To me, there is a minor takeaway and a major one.

Minor takeaway: The odds that this has a very positive impact on cancer are not high. That said, since it’s naturally occurring in the body and there don’t appear to be downsides to taking it as a supplement, if I had cancer, I would look into this in more detail and consider it.

Major takeaway: There are probably dozens of potential compounds like this one that we don’t pay any attention to, simply because our social incentives are not appropriately structured. Wouldn’t a government want to test this? How can we change our system to invest more in finding out? Should we?

Actual Cancer Treatments

I assume we can’t pay attention to all potential cancer cures because there are too many to pursue. The result of all this research is that we’re beating cancer little by little:

Via this

The fact that cancer deaths have dropped by about 35% in the US while the median age of the population has increased from about 33 years old to 38 is astounding.

GLP-1 Wonderdrugs

It turns out that GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs like Ozempic don’t just reduce diabetes and obesity, but might also reduce heart disease, atherosclerosis, metabolic liver disease, diabetic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, strokes, compulsive behavior, addictive behavior…

Now it’s been shown that another drug in the family, Tirzepatide, reduced the transition from prediabetes to diabetes by 94%! Wot!?

I found this theory interesting: Maybe many of the diseases of our time are due to something we’ve put in our food or water that is a GLP-1 turbocharger, and thus indirectly causes all these other issues. It would certainly be a parsimonious explanation.

Reversing Diabetes

A 25-year-old woman with type-1 diabetes received a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells and three months later she started producing her own insulin, reversing her diabetes! Source.

HIV Can Be Prevented

When the results of a new drug that prevented 100% of HIV cases were announced at the 2024 AIDS conference, the room burst into spontaneous applause.

Original paper, via this

Save 14% of African Children’s Deaths with Antibiotics

A few trials in Africa are showing that randomly distributing at scale a basic antibiotic to children reduced their deaths by 13-18%.

This is amazing! It tackles ALL child mortality! And it’s cheap, and doable! And Africans have suffered enough disease to really appreciate medical improvements.

It also begs the question: How many bacterial infections are children in general and Africans in particular going through at any given time?

Next up:

• Aging

• AI in healthcare

• Other great non-AI tools for healthcare

• The effect of bad healthcare regulation

• The benefits of showers

And more.