infectious causes for autoimmune diseases?
I would love to hear an episode on autoimmune disease, and specifically the hypothesis that autoimmune diseases can be a result of chronic infection as suggested in the book Chronic by Parish and Stevens, about lyme(+) disease. Of course the idea is marred by the whole Wakefiled business but putting that aside (and setting very clearly that measles doesn't cause Crohn's or autism, and that was an appalling and frankly evil affair) - what is the evidence that the underlying cause of at least some auto-immune diseases is infectious? And that perhaps the initial infectious insult may or may not cause some symptoms (like lyme), and then the immune response to that insult is what becomes a syndrome in itself (perhaps like in cardiac disease?). Another example is that we just had a massive societal experiment with covid-19 - could it be that this just revealed enough such cases that we call "long covid", but that's something that actually happens with more infections and we just didn't see enough cases to make the connection? Perhaps having the author(s) of Chronic would be informative? Or is it a crazy idea? I'd love to hear a detailed discussion on this topic!
request for an in depth discussion on different types of cachexia
It would be very interesting if Peter did an episode on cachexia: how is it diagnosed? At what point does general weight loss get classified as cachexia? Can it be reversed at any point at all (is there maybe such thing as reversible pre-cachexia)? Can we predict when it becomes irreversible? What are the existing biomarkers? Is there a difference between cancer cachexia and cardiac cachexia? What are Peter's thoughts on this idea (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35954163/), that cancer cachexia could be understood through the lens of endurance exercise (this is a theoretical paper but it does rely on data by Inigo San Millan that Peter has discussed several times on the podcast). It's a topic that doesn't get covered much it seems, and it would be great to hear a discussion of the current state of understanding of this phenomenon.
Is Graviola extract (Annona muricata) a potential treatment for LDL?
After doing a deep dive of all things ASCVD on Peter's site, I spoke with my doctor to setup a test for apoB and Lp(a) along with my normal lipid panel. That same day I was telling my wife about scheduling these tests and she mentioned how her Brazilian grandpa used Graviola extract to dramatically lower his LDL-C. There appears to be limited studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6682994/ Does Peter have any thoughts on this? I've heard him causally mention "herbal remedies" before in a negative context, but with not much additional info. Thanks!