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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It depends A LOT on your country and health system / coverage among many other things. But here’s my two cents based on a country with public healthcare.
    It is a common cathegory in neuropsicological evaluations when a person starts refering to cognitive difficulties that may or may not be quantifiable as of yet. We put this group under “cognitive complain”, sometimes their evaluation reveals actual changes in cognitive performance, sometimes it doesn’t. This group sometimes progresses throughout the years into dementia, but not always, since many factors can impair your cognitive habilities (stress, depression, anxiety, other conditions like MS, etc.).
    The laboratory could benefit then from providing a bunch of hospitals that perform these evaluations with the tests to diagnose the profile they need for the medicine to work (as Ive seen done in my country with many conditions, including rarer types of cancer and rare genetical disseases). The lab benefits cause otherwise, no one would buy the drug and no coverage would approve it without proof its going to work. This works becuase anyone, money or not, can schedule an evaluation and these hospitals when they have cognitive complaints.

    There´s also clinical trials and or other research projects usually in place in these kinds of hospitals, already studying and performing various tests on dementia patients. Elly lilly just has to find and support a PHD project that studies amyloid buildup and then everyone participating gets tested (and then referred somewhere for treatment with the drug). I dont wanna reveal too much of my life on the internet but Ive seen something awfully similar to this first hand in my own country, a bunch of families got genetical testing for dementia for free, then everyone positive to certain genes got referred for treatment.

    As research progresses, some other laboratory may come up with a drug that works for a different type of dementia profile, and then it gets easier because they often strike up deals between the two laboratories. They both eat up the cost of testing, since one of them is likely to benefit from it. It is already done this way for genetical testing for rare disseases (again, we are talking a country where the patient does not need to pay or just pays their monthly fee for private coverage but no extra for these things cause they are covered by law).

    Then all they need is to get their medication approved and included in the lists of medicines that are covered by law. There’s health coverages specifically for older people that often get deals with the laboratories of medications their patients are more likely to need. you get the ball rolling, probably a patient support program that can help with adherence and provide guidance to the patients and their families as to which documents to submit and where to get their medication covered.

    What I mean is, its going to be different in different places, but there are already plenty of medications that require prior testing (sometimes really expensive testing) so the pipeline is already in place. I know nothing of amyloid buildup, but if there’s any chance its genetic, then the easier it will be (cause then you take current dementia patients and test their families).



  • Commenting here because I wouldn’t know where else to do so.
    I had my kbin set to Spanish (preferred it in English so Im glad I someone else asked how to change that), funny thing is, since yesterday I think, whenever language is set to Spanish the little legend next to the username that indicates how long ago something was posted was in Greek.
    Or at least I think it’s greek, since I don’t read greek.

    Upon switching language into English it got resolved, but if I turn it back to spanish, it reads in greek again





  • Yeah, I gave advice on some smaller / niche, topics. I didn’t delete the whole thing, only my most upvoted and/or most recent comments (I went all the way to december 2022, and every comment with more than 20 upvotes). Replaced it all with a link to my kbin.

    It was kind of sad reading all the replies that were like “we should put this comment in the FAQ / this is the best comment / this covers everything”. I was very throughout and loved speading what I learned, and it pains me a little the few times I lurked in those communities since moving to kbin and see lots of unanswered pleads for advice or straight up terrible advice being given…






  • I moved all useful resources and information to kbin, which Im organizing neatly in a one person one suscriber magazine. Then edited all my comments to that community to lead there.
    If anyone comes looking for the info, they can find it.

    That said, I just edited everything from this year and every single comment I made with 20 upvotes or more. My posts I hid from my profile, and either deleted, edited, marked NSFW or a combination of those options, the rest I left there cause I don’t like deleting everythin willy nilly.


  • My grandma took care of me from the moment I was two months old till I was old enough to travel on my own and cook my own food, and even after that we would continue meeting for lunch every week. My mom and dad were present in my life and loving parents but divorced when I was really young and both had to work and travel a lot, through it all, I’d always had her.
    At the time of the story, my dear grandma was slowly dying in her struggle with depression. In-patient treatment had done little to nothing, she was on several psychiatric medications, no dice.

    In the middle of this I had an interview scheduled for an internship in a field I really cared about and for the life of me, I couldn’t find the room the interview was being held at in that laberynth of a faculty building. I would go to where the receptionist told me and find nothing, Id ask teachers and no one knew the place I was headed to. Id open random doors and got into offices where people would rush me out. The clock was ticking and I felt incredibly stupid at not being able to find the stupid room. The building wasn’t even that large.

    And all of a sudden it was too much and I just… broke down sobbing and couldnt stop, everything was too much. Must have been ugly crying for half an hour straight. My eyes were so puffy I could barely even see anymore.
    What I wont forget about that time is how many of the 17 - 18 year-old students approached me that day: offered me water, or to show me the bathroom, asked if I needed a phone to call anyone. One girl even hugged me while I continued crying my hear out and helped me email the person I was supposed to meet that day to tell them I had a personal emergency, while she heard out everything that was going on with me and try her best to assure me everything would turn out fine.
    On my way home, people on the public transport would offer me seats, or ask if I was alright.

    Sounds like small things, but in the world we live in sometimes its easy to believe nobody gives a shit anymore.
    I did get that internship, the following week. And continue to be in that field of work.


  • I mean, if all you are posting is John Oliver, it achieves three goals:
    1- Puts the spotlight on the protest, which many users probably didn’t know much about or didn’t understand (cause they were out of the loop and just found reddit blacked out all of a sudden).
    2- People eventually will get tired of John Oliver and/ or the same images will start getting reposted over and over again, which makes the sub uninteresting and users less likely to lurk or engage.
    3-New users of the platform will come into reddit and see it filled with a bunch of crap instead of thought out content.

    Since reddit is not playing fair there is no easy answer on what’s the best way to protest. If they remain closed and they just put new mods in charge that will keep the sub running bussiness as usual, making the sub as unatractive as posible sounds like a better option.
    I personally jumped ship and came to kbin, but I don’t run a subreddit.




  • Im not a mod, but on a smaller scale on my own profile, I grabbed all my most upvoted comments (started from the really upvoted ones until I reached 20 upvotes or so) and edited them out to only leave the first few phrases or words. Then inserted a message that read:

    “This used to be a full comment, you can find more resources in the link bellow since I have moved to kbin and reddit doesn’t deserve my content! Bye reddit, you won’t be missed!
    For more [subject] advice, find me on https://kbin.social/m/[subject]”

    Bonus points if I could cut the comment out at the exact time it was about to become useful “Whats actually going on here is that…”

    Did that sorting by most upvoted and also my fresh, since it wass manual I only managed to do so much, But I liked the approach better than just deleting it all or editing with “fuckspez” so that they could get back and revert it.




  • Paul Ekman had this “theory of basic emotions” that were supposedly universal for humans and had their set of “innate” gestures for each one.
    For his original works, he travelled to some secluded communities and registered that the expressions for “happiness / fear / anger / disgust / sadness / surprise” were supposedly shared among human kind.
    Why do I say supposedly? Because a lot of Ekman’s theory was disproved (for example, he claimed each emotion had an area of the brain dedicated to it, or at least some unique structure, which fMRI studies are not finding to be true, even if there is a lot we still don’t know on human emotion). There’s also claims that he contamined his data when he went to these secluded communities, and influenced (probably unknowingly) his results to make everyone’s expressions match the ones he expected for each emotion.

    So… are there universal expresions of emotion? Not an easy answer. The physical responses more linked to survival probably are (say fight/ flight in response to fear, startle in response to surprise). The more social ones? don’t know, some may be heavily influenced by culture. You would have to make a study on very young, blind babies from different cultures or something of the sort which would not be easy. Also there’s the thing that babies cannot tell you what emotion they are experimenting, even if you can asume some (loud noise and baby is crying probably equals fear, BUT the baby can’t confirm it, which is a methodological problem for some Scientists).

    If this interests you, Ledoux has some great approachable work on the “survival circuits” of the brain that explain emotion in a way comparable to animals and linked to their evolutional value.