I know there is always ongoing research into the underlying biology of disease, as well as new treatment regimens and I’m guessing breaking diseases into subcategories due to different biological underpinnings (example: depression can have multiple causes, and treatment has to address the underlying causative factors). But is medicine still discovering entirely new diseases as a common thing?
I know I read several years ago it was a (mildly) big deal when some dentist discovered some new muscle, because researchers felt they had identified all the muscles of the body. There wasn’t much new info to gain about the macro anatomy of the human body (although we still have tons of cellular info we don’t understand).
There are something like 80 autoimmune diseases, maybe 200 diseases due to pathogenic microbes that humans can suffer from. Are we still discovering new ones or are those numbers pretty stable? I’m sure some new ones are discovered here and there, but is a world where we have identified 200 distinct autoimmune diseases or 400 diseases due to pathogens possible, or have we reached a point where the evidence just isn’t there that there are tons of new diseases we haven’t discovered yet?
Not just discovered – new ones are being created all the time. Specifically, we are killing off the ones that hurt us via antibiotics, leaving the survivors behind to breed more of them. Thus new infectious organisms which are resistant to our current antibiotics.
In addition, existing diseases, like influenza, are constantly evolving new strains that sicken humans. Medical authorities are regularly worried about a possible ‘deadly’ strain that might jump to humans and spread widely.
AIDS is also a ‘new’ disease, first occurring about 100 years ago, and then becoming widespread about a third of a century ago.
Both of these last 2 are aggravated by the ease & speed of international travel nowadays. It used to be that such outbreaks could be confined geographically, and the spread restricted. That’s much harder to do now.
New infectious diseases will evolve, I agree. What I’m asking is is it possible that there are lots of diseases we currently suffer from that haven’t been discovered yet?
Example, infectious microbes could play a role in diseases like schizophrenia or obesity. People are already suffering, it is just that the diseases haven’t been discovered.
So a couple new infectious diseases could be discovered. However that is 1% of the 200ish microbe diseases medicine has already discovered. A few new microbe diseases will evolve, and a few that already exist will be discovered but it seems like by and large medicine has discovered 90% or so of all infectious diseases for example.
Well, it was only a decade or so that we discovered that ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. That’s quite a common affliction, that’s been around forever, so if we missed that one, we could certainly miss others.
I think that HPV causing cervical cancer was also a fairly recent discovery, and I don’t think anyone would be surprised to find viral causes for more cancers.
There’s a whole field known as emerging infectious diseases concerned with diseases that are new or have seen an increase in recent years.
It’s not so much that we are currently suffering from them to any great extent, but that new diseases that infect animals have been either jumping to humans for the first time (sometimes because humans have been coming into contact with animals more due to deforestation), or else have been spreading more widely due to increased travel and connectivity, or have been recognized for the first time although they have been present for a while.
Some of these diseases have included HIV/AIDS, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg virus, Nipah Virus, Chikungunya, and others. No doubt there are many more potential ones.
And Bovine SpongeBob Encephalopathy, which causes cows to waste away while watching too much TV cartoon shows, which apparently jumped species from human children to cows fairly recently.
The whole class of prion diseases and prion-like and prion-suspected diseases seems to be a new thing. Alzheimers Disease is now being investigated as possibly being some kind of prion-like disease, and I think I’ve read of other brain-degenerative diseases being investigated likewise.
“Old age” is not some catch all single cause, probably, but a whole host of system failures and flaws in the human body that kill it. In the future, doctors will probably think of “old age” is 100 or so separate distinct disease mechanisms. Alas, there will probably be a long era when doctors know all about what causes the disease but can do nothing to stop it.
There are large parts of the world with very few medical resources–for example in Africa. Thus I wouldn’t be surprised if there were undiscovered infectious diseases there.
Well, I guess congenital disorders are a bottomless pit, as it’s entirely arbitrary where you draw the line between sub-optimal gene and disease. And the more mild a particular “wrong” gene’s symptoms are, the less likely anyone has studied it yet.
That’s not to say the only congenital disorders we discover now are of the mild variety, just that that’s a reason we could keep naming and studying congenital disorders indefinitely.
Even the idea of “disease” is undergoing shifts. We’re just now recognizing the ecological nature of gut flora. What’s growing in there matters a bunch to the health of the host, i.e. you.
Is it a “disease” to have a suboptimal gut ecosystem?
Is it a “disease” to have a fairly typical gut ecosystem, but unfortunately have the common variant which causes host obesity and all the attendant degenerative morbidity / mortality versus having the “other” common stable flora mix that causes host leanness on the same diet?
And if you think getting your gut *flora *out of whack is bad, check out what happens when the gut *fauna *is unbalanced: xkcd: Gut Fauna
Also, science is learning so much more about “known” diseases that many are being sub-categorized. For example, I’m only 52 (just to establish a time scale) and was “born” with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. (Born in quotes because doctors debated whether that was possible, but I was diagnosed at 6 months old.) For my first 6 or so years doctors had no idea what to do about me because arthritis was thought to be an “old person’s disease”, so I was put through the entire Barnum and Bailey 6-ring circus of testing by every specialist in existence at the time. By the time I was 30, JRA had well documented symptoms, blood chemistry, and had even been sub-divided into different types (weight bearing joints affected, small joints affected, etc) because after many years they found distinct patterns in the way it affected people. Many doctors are still ambivalent about me but one time my current Rheumatologist told me I was “textbook”.
The whole auto-immune thing still isn’t well known, so there is debate about whether fibromyalgia is a real thing, and sometimes people get diagnosed with “general connective tissue disease”. My hubby is one of those. He frequently and for no reason gets tendonitis, bursitis, muscle and joint pain for no reason and is being treated for fibro for lack of a better diagnosis. I joke and tell him he has “connective tissue issues”.
I suspect that the autism spectrum and other spectrum things are in this situation also.
No, it was only a decade ago that Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Their discovery that Helicobacter pylori causes peptic ulcer was made in the 1980s.
This morning’s news ran a story on Chagas disease, spread by “kissing bugs.” Now in Houston & can be deadly! Details from Dallas:
So, not “really” new–but new to the USA. Or not so new–my grandmother had Dengue Fever (from That List) in the early years of the 20th century. In Texas.
Up until the early 1970’s, homosexuality was a disease, and then they discovered it’s not.
In 1994, Asperger’s Syndrome was “discovered”. Actually, first described by Dr. Hans Asperger in 1954 or so; became “official” in 1994 with the publication of DSM-IV. Now, it’s disappeared with the recent publication of DSM-V.
Sometimes diseases are just what they say they are.
Yes, but prion-type diseases were known (kuru, Kreutzfield-Jacob, scrapie in sheep) but their cause weren’t. Although I am not certain this has been fully confirmed, mad cow is thought to have been created by feeding sheep remains to cattle where the scrapie prion somehow evolved to become bovine spongiformencephalopathy which was then transmitted to humans. It has disappeared since they made it illegal to feed sheep remains to cattle. Oddly, AFAIK, humans cannot get it from sheep.
The tricky thing with prions is that they’re not precisely germs. If a cow eats sheep prions and the cow’s brain ends up riddled with prions as a result, they’re still distinctly cow prions, not sheep prions. The cow prions aren’t in any sense “descended” from sheep prions-- it’s more like “inspired by” them.
Sounds like splitting hairs to me, like arguing that viruses are not alive. Maybe they aren’t, for certain definitions of “alive”, but…the very first “life” on earth is thought to have been self replicating molecules that don’t metabolize or do anything but catalyze their own replication, given a host environment with the right chemistry. Just like prions.
