there should be more like it. (thanks for the archive link btw!)
I think that is already known for a while. It's called functional reserve, and was a big topic in HIV patients (and then again for SARS-CoV-2).
Like people with higher cognitive capabilities will be protected by those a bit longer before onset of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (or even dementia).
Same for kidneys: They have a functional reserve that you are born with gets used up during life, until it is gone. Acute kidney disease treatment is aimed at preserving whatever little function is left.
Another case is when disease starts subtly and slowly _with_ initial symptoms that are otherwise not debilitating. Eg Alzheimer's starting decades ago by being forgetful.
I have no idea which one the post is reffering to.
So I pulled up blood work results going back 15 years that I had records for and found that 73 was my high score! It typically was mid 60s, with a low of 61. I have no idea why it is so low. Anyway, this is the reason I'm relating this story. It seems odd that my kidney function has gone up. It wasn't just a fluke -- I've had bloodwork done at least five times since then and I'm always in the mid 70s now.
With the vascular system you have example arterial elasticity which is an important measure of vascular health. When your blood vessels become less elastic it does not immediately cause symptoms, but it increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. This is also why periodontitis and gum disease is a predictor for vascular diseases: Bacteria enter the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa and form plaques along the blood vessels.
And yet in the year 2025 dental care is globally treated as seperate from other healthcare, a strange historical artifact that clings on.
It is most likely not a single thing.
Looking for "the functional reserve" is like looking for which part of an airplane is the "multiple redundancy". Or which line of code is the "fault tolerance" in google's code base. It is not a single part, it is all the parts working together.
Just looking at the kidney example (which is not the only kind of function we can describe having functional reserve.) functional reserve is that there are two kidneys, and each kidney have multiple renal pyramids, and if this or that part of the kidney functions worse other parts compensate and will work overtime.
Depletion of functional reserve is not something literally running out (like a fuel tank running empty), it is more like a marauding gang shooting computers in a cloud data center. Sure initially all works as it used to, because the system identifies the damaged components and routes the processing to other ones. But if they keep it up they will damage enough that the data center will keel over and can't do what it could do before.
(No, I'm not saying that a human body is literally a data center, or literally an airplane. What I'm saying is that all three shares the common theme that some process is maintained in the presence of faults.)
I wonder if, in parts, the effects of the so called "mild covid" and "long covid" (usually attributed to post-flu) are nothing but psychological. There seems to be quite a cloud of uncertainty around the vast array of reported possible symptoms.
AI might be real stressor for those losing their job, or bad for those using it as a virtual love interest or therapist, but it's mostly a remote worry for most too.
Of the three, only the covid flu could have real mild/long effects. But if you want to seek other psychological factors, iflation, the job market, the loneliness epidemic, and other such things are much more likely ones...
We are several years in now. These statements are actually pretty hurtful for people who have been through a lot. It's like saying you could beat cancer if you only wanted to, or if you didn't think all those negatives thoughts, you wouldn't be so ill now.
Not only is it suggesting that this misery is in some way 'your own fault', but it also implies that it isn't real, or serious, at least not in the same way other diseases are.
And yes, psychological problems are real too, indeed. But it is not the same. The origin narrative around a disease does in fact matter for people trying to cope with it, and how others see you, for insurance, for politics and medical care. Please be more respectful about it.
It's possible that social media is making people ill, but long COVID is very real and very different.
Uncertainty does not imply psychological. It’s like saying ”our users report a lot of different bugs that we can’t reproduce, they must be all imagined”, except the body is OOMs more complex than even the most carelessly developed enterprise application. There is uncertainty in every part of medicine, all the time. That’s why it takes time and is difficult (often too difficult) to root cause everything that happens.
If you have a novel pathogen with neurological effects (see olfactory impacts - people literally losing their sense of smell), it would be my first guess of mysterious symptoms rather than.. checks notes the war in Ukraine? Honestly I’m not sure how to connect your first sentence to the next.
Sounds like a misguided incentive ...
But even with your point, all insurance companies I've ever had cover with in the UK have had some element of support for preventing illness (periodic assessments, support material and trackers) and, at least with people covered under company schemes, they clearly have an incentive to offer more if you are at risk of becoming affected by a preventable illness.
In theory it’s possible the best early treatment is no treatment at all; that there might be such a thing as too-early detection.
For example, a PSA test is useful to detect cancer of the prostate, if a male patient has urination problems. But doing general screening for high PSA values in middle aged men is not considered a good idea, because there are too many false positives and it would likely lead to many unnecessary invasive interventions.
Two people develop a fatal cancer at T0. One is diagnosed at T1, the other at T2, both die at T3.
It looks like the first person survived longer with cancer than the second, but they didn't: the interventions had no effect, it's just a statistical artifact.
This is by no means always the case - earlier detected cancer is more treatable - but it still needs to be controlled for.
helsinkiandrew•4d ago