#It was a small sample size

[shinseifer]

"average cat owner spends 3 years in prison" factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette's mother, who kicked her body like the football and went to jail for One Thousand Years is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[reasonsforhope]

A new treatment combining ReCET and semaglutide could eliminate the need for insulin in type 2 diabetes, with 86% of participants in a study no longer requiring insulin therapy. The treatment was safe and well-tolerated, and further trials are planned to confirm these results.

Groundbreaking research presented at UEG Week 2024 introduces a promising new treatment approach for type 2 diabetes (T2D) that has the potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for insulin therapy.

This innovative approach, which combines a novel procedure known as ReCET (Re-Cellularization via Electroporation Therapy) with semaglutide, resulted in the elimination of insulin therapy for 86% of patients.

Globally, T2D affects 422 million people... While insulin therapy is commonly used to manage blood sugar levels in T2D patients, it can result in side effects... and further complicate diabetes management. [Note: Also very importantly it's fucking bankrupting people who need it!!] A need therefore exists for alternative treatment strategies.

Study Design and Outcomes

The first-in-human study included 14 participants aged 28 to 75 years, with body mass indices ranging from 24 to 40 kg/m². Each participant underwent the ReCET procedure under deep sedation, a treatment intended to improve the body’s sensitivity to its own insulin. Following the procedure, participants adhered to a two-week isocaloric liquid diet, after which semaglutide was gradually titrated up to 1mg/week.

Remarkably, at the 6- and 12-month follow-up, 86% of participants (12 out of 14) no longer required insulin therapy, and this success continued through the 24-month follow-up. In these cases, all patients maintained glycaemic control, with HbA1c levels remaining below 7.5%.

Tolerability and Safety

The maximum dose of semaglutide was well-tolerated by 93% of participants, one individual could not increase to the maximum dose due to nausea. All patients successfully completed the ReCET procedure, and no serious adverse effects were reported.

Dr Celine Busch, lead author of the study, commented, “These findings are very encouraging, suggesting that ReCET is a safe and feasible procedure that, when combined with semaglutide, can effectively eliminate the need for insulin therapy.”

“Unlike drug therapy, which requires daily medication adherence, ReCET is compliance-free [meaning: you don't have to take it every day], addressing the critical issue of ongoing patient adherence in the management of T2D. In addition, the treatment is disease-modifying: it improves the patient’s sensitivity to their own (endogenous) insulin, tackling the root cause of the disease, as opposed to currently available drug therapies, that are at best disease-controlling.”

Looking ahead, the researchers plan to conduct larger randomized controlled trials to further validate these findings. Dr. Busch added, “We are currently conducting the EMINENT-2 trial with the same inclusion and exclusion criteria and administration of semaglutide, but with either a sham procedure or ReCET. This study will also include mechanistic assessments to evaluate the underlying mechanism of ReCET.”

-via SciTechDaily, October 17, 2024

--

Note: If it works even half as well as suggested, this could free so many people from the burden of the ongoing ridiculous cost of insulin. Pharma companies that make insulin can go choke (hopefully).

[brightgreendandelions]

reblog for sample size :)

[liquidstar]

Also something we were discussing at pascha today

[leet911]

On Consent (and drunken escapades)

[Spoilers for Reverse 4 You and The Secret of Us]

Honestly, this episode of Reverse 4 You didn’t make me as uncomfortable as The Secret of Us.  In this case, Four is drunk, but she’s also clearly the initiator.  I don’t feel like Wa is taking advantage of her.  From everything that we’ve seen prior, Wa is clearly into Four, and as clueless as Wa may be, as viewers we know Four is also into her.  And I think if you could magic away the alcohol somehow and ask Four if she really wants to do this, she would say yes in the moment.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that she won’t regret it the next morning (damn you ep5 preview), but there isn’t anything against her will happening.  It doesn’t seem like Wa is taking advantage of Four’s impaired judgment.

This is in contrast to The Secret of Us, when Earn takes Lada home from the bar, they haven’t gotten back together yet, they’re both still doing the thing to make each other jealous, and it’s unclear if Lada has forgiven Earn for the past.  As I was watching, I kept hoping that Earn would put the brakes on at some point, and just let Lada sleep it off.  Because if we go by the same measure as above, and magically make Lada sober in that moment, would she have agreed to what happened?  I’m unsure, and that makes me a lot less comfortable.  Even if Lada is being jealous, and she’s still physically attracted to Earn, on an intellectual level I don’t know if she was ready to go back there no matter how much Earn wanted to.  You can see Lada tries to leave when she wakes up afterwards, and she’s trying to get away from Earn.  This one seems more like Earn taking advantage of Lada’s impaired judgment.  And yeah, that made me feel a lot worse about it.

Consent is important y’all.

[dykesynthezoid]

Very funny to me than unless Pandora eventually shows up in the show, it is gonna end up seeming like women are just sort of inherently better at dealing with being vampires

[delcat177]

No results tab, we die like little guys

[plutonium-sky]

Was unsure whether or not to post these dragon au sketches of Teth and Sah + Mekh but then Ebi told me to so- here u go very rough sketches of Insect Dragon Teth and Idiot Twin Wyverns

I'm gonna try to get all the Elders LOL

[nico-the-overlord]

Also here it is written out since open four on text is sort of weird

I always see people writing an open four, I do closed four. I don’t know if it’s uncommon or what

[bauliya]

Europe what the fuck

[iamthekarmapolice]

im convinced that those skibidi toilet brainrot reels i keep seeing on Instagram aren’t popular with kids at all, like would stake my life savings so far on the main demographic being people in their mid to late 20s. i am sure the average 12 year-old has never heard of the term ‘fanum tax’ or knows who quandale dingle of the tiktok rizz party is

[edennill]

Utúlie'n Aurë!

A little late in the day to say this, but today (June 21st, or the Summer Solstice/Midsummer's Day) is the date the Fifth Battle of Beleriand began.

(-- not the Nirnaeth, yet; it would only be called that from the moment things began to go wrong, that is on June 24th, but I shall keep you updated)

I do not suppose this calls for a celebration but the Les Mis fandom does do this...

[galacticfire]

reading the carbon monoxide inhalation study done in collaboration with a WADA lab and im afraid the gas huffing memes were all true

[laventadorn]

This is half about danmei, which isn't the main or even tertiary purpose of this blog, BUT also half about writing in general, so here I stick it.

I've been reading danmei since 2020 but I've really struggled to write anything for it. If i measure success by just getting something going, the fic I'm currently working on is the most "successful" venture I've had. It took me ages to even crank out the opening scenes. Despite longing to write in the New Hyperfixation for a long time, I just couldn't grok it.

Initially I thought it was unfamiliarity with the background of the culture the media was based in. With HP, for example, there is a whole lot of English culture that's easily accessible to me, and I studied British literature in school for years. Obviously this isn't the same thing as being English, but it gave me enough of a background to fake it that once when i applied to a graduate program in England, they thought I was actually English.

But with china, there is so much I don't understand and can't access in the same way, so I thought perhaps that was the problem.

But now I'm thinking it's more about the literary approach.

The tradition I learned to write in is one of realism. I often cite Jane Austen as my favorite author; she was a writer of realism: people, situations, and style are all as close to reality as possible. She was actually one of the most hard-line realist writers of the time, even meticulously accurate in minutiae such as how long it took to travel between cities, or when you could reasonably expect to receive a letter. The way she renders character is also heavily based in the psychology of real people, especially in the latter half of her career. And I love the psychology of character. Nothing interests me more as a reader or a writer. It's what I use as a foundation for writing: how to render people and their emotional responses within a tradition of realism, so that they feel (as much as possible, given that i also love fantasy) like genuine human beings.

But this is not, in my experience of it, what Chinese BL is about.

Now, the first of my caveats is that plenty of western media isn't, either (though fandom tends to be obsessed with it to the point of mania, where a character's psychology is microscopically detailed, in particular their responses to trauma). But western media often maintains a veneer of it -- my favorite marvel movie is Captain America: the Winter Soldier, which features Steve feeling purposeless and empty in a world he no longer fits in. (And then his internal conflict is symbolically made external with the reappearance of his dearest friend, whose mind has been wiped to forget him.) That whole movie revolves around Steve's psychology. And that's a big budget blockbuster movie chock full of punchy, blow-uppy action scenes. It still finds time to make a character feel depressed and lost.

(They then did absolutely nothing interesting with it, but you know. They had a single moment.)

To a certain extent, if western media is character based, it has to explore the characters' mental state, and tries to do so in a way that enlightens both the audience and the character, opening up their dark parts and forcing them to change. We probably have Joseph Campbell to thank for a lot of this; his Hero's Journey was modeled heavily on the works of Carl Jung, the psychologist. In fact, Carl Jung was hugely influential in English-speaking literary criticism of the 1970's. (I say "English speaking" because that's the only field I'm familiar with.) To give you the biggest example I know of, Ursula K. le Guin's phenomenal Earthsea trilogy is steeped in Jungian psychology, no book more so than the opening novel, A Wizard of Earthsea. The climax of that novel blew my mind, by the way.

My second caveat is this: it's not that the patterns of Chinese BL don't have character work, or that they aren't concerned with the character's interiority. With my fixation on character, if those things were entirely absent, I wouldn't be reading these books. It's more that the media tradition of hyper-focus on the characters' mental state, the delicate unfolding of their psychology, is not what drives the media. The characters do suffer, and they have feelings and desires, but they are often preternaturally strong-willed and able to withstand horrific trauma while still maintaining their sense of self.

(Two characters really come to mind. One is Chang Geng from Sha Po Lang, whose "mother" repeatedly puts him through such intense physical and psychological abuse in his childhood that you wonder how anyone could possibly stay sane. But he's also been injected with a magical poison that will drive him insane, and gives him bloody nightmares every night, and requires him to drink blood -- you get the idea. The other is Gu Mang from Yuwu: Remnants of Filth, who goes through things that are just mind-bogglingly Yiiiikes. Each of them feels the pain, but realism isn't where we're trying to arrive at, because it would be impossible for a real person to hold it together under the things they endured. But neither of them is supposed to be like a real person. Chang Geng, Gu Mang, is supposed to be more.)

Nothing is always. To use the novel I'm writing for as an obvious example toward some measure of realism, Xie Lian spends Book 4 being deeply traumatized; it's part of his character journey and essential to the plot. But his character psychology is still not based in realism. It wasn't designed to be. MXTX herself said in her afterword for TGCF that neither Hua Cheng nor Xie Lian were remotely like real people, because they weren't supposed to be. They were supposed to be larger than life, more than mere existence.

So when I am puttering around with my Psychology of the Individual writing tool, I get a bit wrong-footed because the entire way that I approach writing does not seamlessly settle into this brave new frontier. How can I realistically explore the emotions and mind of people who are not written to be like real people at all? That's what's truly been stumping me.

But the answer appears to be... I can do what I want! hohohoho