Quotes About Disease

statins may lessen brain function and increase risk for heart disease. The reason is simple: The brain needs cholesterol

all manner of disease is rooted in inflammation run amok, and your immune system controls inflammation.

ApoE ?2 is relatively rare, but if you inherit this allele, you're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease later in life. ApoE ?3 is the most common allele, but it's believed to neither increase nor decrease your risk. ApoE ?4, however, is the one typically mentioned in the media and feared the most. In

the "normal range" have a much greater risk for brain

Our understanding of how cholesterol is critical for brain health has brought me and many others in my field to believe that statins—the blockbuster drugs prescribed to millions of Americans to lower cholesterol—may cause or exacerbate brain disorders and disease. Memory dysfunction is a known side effect of statins.

ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE—TYPE 3 DIABETES?

The whole notion that ADHD is a specific disease easily remedied by a pill is convenient but alarming. In several schools throughout the United States as many as 25 percent of students are routinely receiving powerful, mind-altering medications, the long-term consequences of which have never been studied!

babies who are regularly breast-fed when they are first introduced to foods containing gluten have been shown to cut their risk of developing celiac disease by 52 percent, compared with those who are not being breast-fed.

Cyrex Array 2, which offers the

You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that we are getting fatter and fatter every year despite all the information sold to us about how to stay slim and trim. You'd also be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't know about our soaring rates of type 2 diabetes. Or the fact that heart disease is our number one killer, trailed closely by cancer.

Brain disease can be largely prevented through the choices you make in life.

Mad cow disease is caused by a prion, a weirdly folded protein molecule that triggers weird folding in other molecules, like Kurt Vonnegut's infectious form of water, ice-nine, in his great early novel Cat's Cradle.

Identifying the new virus was only step one in solving the immediate mystery of Hendra, let alone understanding the disease in a wider context. Step two would involve tracking that virus to its hiding place. Where did it exist when it wasn't killing horses and people? Step three would entail asking a further cluster of questions: How did the virus emerge from its secret refuge, and why here, and why now?

Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?

Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.

It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there's a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can't persist indefinitely as an endemic, circulating infection. This is known as the critical community size (CCS), an important parameter in disease dynamics.

Spillover" is the term used by disease ecologists (it has a different use for economists) to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another. It's a focused event.

As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.

Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.

Another implication was that epidemics don't end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population.

if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.

Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It's caused by a paramyxovirus