An investigator could design a study today with the drugs mentioned in the article as they are old drugs approved by the FDA many years ago. All cross the blood brain barrier so I’m not sure what the silver nanoparticle does. Cases are super rare but for example the CDC or the NIH could do or fund a case study series. The Malaysian team will be on the road to nowhere w a study in insects.
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The fact that infection of the brain by amoebae can prove to be fatal reminds me, as a recovering Lyme disease patient, of a research paper from 2011 by the Swiss neurologist J. Miklossy which finds that 90% of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients' brains are found to be infected with pathogenic spirochetal (i.e. cork screw shaped) bacteria similar to the syphilis bacterium, a known cause of dementia. She finds that there are two separate sources for these spirochetes: 25% of AD brains are infected with Lyme bacteria (Borrelia burgdorferi, transmitted to humans by tick bite), and 80% with spirochetes that originate in the mouth, and reach the brain either through nerve pathways, or via the bloodstream (the total of 105% is greater than 90% due to some brains being infected with both). It makes one wonder if the methods being used to combat the brain-eating amoebae might be used also to treat Alzheimer's.
P.S. article citation:
J Neuroinflammation. 2011 Aug 4;8:90. doi: 10.1186/1742-2094-8-90.
Alzheimer's disease - a neurospirochetosis. Analysis of the evidence following Koch's and Hill's criteria.
Miklossy J1.
article link:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=miklossy+j%2C+neurospirochetosis
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I am left wondering what will come of the silver nanoparticles left in the brain after the infection has been conquered.
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@parthasarathy
Nothing much. It'll be like a tiny dose of colloidal silver. It'd take a lot more silver, and much larger particles, to mess up the body.
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@parthasarathy While I agree that this is a concern, having my brain infected with this amoeba species is generally lethal. In other words, I would take my chance with the silver nanoparticles and their sequelea; I might survive those at least for a while, whereas the amoeba infection will kill me with some certainty, and it's not exactly a pleasant death, either.
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Very promising! A treatment for this devastating brain infection would indeed be a major advance. Regarding delivery of this type of drug to the CNS: wouldn't an intrathecal shunt allow avoiding the issue of having to work around the blood-brain-barrier?
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Unfortunately, amoeba are much more closely related evolutionarily to animals and fungi than to any other eukaryotes (organisms with a cell nucleus; plants, algae, cilliates, plasmodium, etc.) or much more distantly related bacteria. This close evolutionary relationship means humans share many more biochemical pathways with amoeba than, for example bacteria and is the reason why there are so few drugs that only target amoeba without disrupting the similar biochemical pathways in human cells. The blood brain barrier is a further restriction on a drug to target amoeba or any other microorganism attacking Bahrain tissue, as this article mentions.
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First rate science! Good to see. Sure, long ways to go, but it's a "foot in the door' - which is the first step.
Now we need feet in the doors for prions, ticks, Lyme... etc. etc.
Congratulations- and good thinking.
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As can be inferred from the article, the number of patients who have survived N. fowleri infection is within the diagnostic uncertainty (that is, nobody would be too surprised if it turned out that all of the ssurvivors had something else) (two of those 4 survivors were very early cases, when diagnostic accuracy was even less than it is now).
This enemy may be farther ahead of us than even the dismal results suggest.
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Even if they can kill the organisms in the brain, there will be ethical questions. Due to the parts of the brain first affected, if a person can be saved, will the rest of their life become an ongoing misery?
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I grew up in Florida in the 1960s. I had several friends whose parents owned lake houses. Swimming in lakes was commonplace. No one ever swam in ponds. Naegleria Fowleri is found also in freshwater lakes and rivers. For educational purposes, this should have been mentioned.
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Good pick up.
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