yosame
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
I think this post is a decent summary, the answer is a soft maybe: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/should-i-worry-...
Second-gen tablets might increase dementia risk by a small-to-medium amount (there's almost certainly still a small degree of CNS activity, and we don't know what causes dementia in the first place), but researching it will be difficult. Dementia is hard to research because of how long it takes to develop, and it's poor coding within health data, and antihistamines are hard to research because they're not often prescribed and aren't available in the health data.
If it's a large effect, those factors wouldn't matter, but smaller risks are harder to detect and more sensitive to bias. If you want to minimise dementia risk, then reducing antihistamine use might be warranted, but you're probably better off addressing the risk factors we do know about: https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/risk-factors-develo...
Unfortunately the sequence of treatments and locations are usually enough to identify someone, especially if it's a rarer condition.
It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.
In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.
(As an aside, there are more complex extended release mechanisms than just delayed bead release - like lisfexamfetamine is a inactive prodrug, so cleaving the lysine off the amphetamine is rate limited. This has the effect of extended the duration of effect, and reduces the potential to abuse by snorting/iv/etc).
And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.
This is a good overview of the literature: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...
On the other hand, if AI data centres all disappeared today, humanity would continue on completely fine.