THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Hormesis: An Overview of the Pubmed Literature

Hormesis: An Overview of the Pubmed Literature

Hormesis is when some things that are bad for you in high doses are actually good for you in low to medium doses -- including radioactivity -- which upsets Greenie scares about leaks of radioactivity.

On balance, it's probable that the Chernobyl meltdown did more good than harm, even to life in the surrounding area. Life is certainly flourishing there better than ever these days. Pesky!

Dr. Ronald N. Kostoff

OVERVIEW

The purpose of this Op-ed is to provide a broad overview of the Pubmed literature in Hormesis (a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition). A unique query was developed to retrieve this literature, and many Hormetins (any stress condition that is able to induce Hormesis) were identified. Hormesis has been a controversial topic because of its potential for modifying exposure limit regulations. Critical articles addressing both sides of this issue are also presented in the next section.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

“Hormesis is a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition”. “Specific aspects of this general nonlinearity phenomenon have been described using various terms mainly addressing the shape of the dose-response curve, as biphasic, bimodal, bitonic, U shaped, inverted U-shaped, J-shaped, nonmonotonic, functional metabolism and stimulatory inhibitory, among others…..

Furthermore, terms such as adaptive response, preconditioning, autoprotection, heteroprotection, paradoxical and others have also been used to describe the shape of the dose-response patterns”. “Hormesis is a special type of biphasic dose-response relationship that has well-defined, quantitative features, including the magnitude and the width of the stimulatory zone and the relationship of the stimulatory zone to the traditional toxicological threshold (no-observed-adverse-effect level)…..

The hormetic dose response also must be seen within a temporal context–that is, as a dose-time-response relationship. The reason for incorporating a temporal feature in hormesis is that it also may be described as a modest over-compensation response following an initial disruption in homeostasis…..The hormetic dose response therefore represents the effects of a reparative process that slightly or modestly overshoots the original homeostatic set point, resulting in the low-dose stimulatory response…..The assessment of the dose response therefore is a dynamic process. Whereas harmful agents may induce toxicity in affected biological systems, the organism or biological system is not a passive entity but, rather, will respond to damage signals with a coordinated series of temporally mediated repair processes. This dynamic aspect of toxicological assessment requires the inclusion of not only a broad range of doses but also a series of temporal evaluations (i.e., repeat measures). Only by assessing the dose-response process over time can an accurate assessment of the dose-response relationship be determined, within which the hormetic dose response is best revealed.” .......

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Hormesis is a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition. Hormetins are substances that produce Hormesis. The present Op-ed identified many hundreds of candidate Hormetins, and provided arguments that showed many more candidate Hormetins could be identified with a well-resourced study. Fifty candidate Hormetins were evaluated, and 45 of the fifty were validated as Hormetins, a 90% success rate. Each of the 45 Hormetins was briefly addressed, in describing the evidence that linked the substance to Hormesis.

The main categories of Hormetins (candidate and validated), based on numbers of studies published, appear to be ionizing radiation, agrochemicals, soil pollutants, water pollutants, air pollutants, medications, food pollutants, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, foods, physical activities, etc. From my perspective, the main limitations are the criteria the authors use for Hormetins, and the spatiotemporal omissions of most studies reported. Typically, the authors will select a few biomarkers, examine changes in their magnitude and direction related to the application of the candidate Hormetin, and if the changes go in a specific direction, conclude that the substance resulted in Hormesis. This is very limited.

If the results of these studies are to be used in health policy-making, as some leaders in the field have suggested, then the spatiotemporal boundaries need to be expanded significantly to ensure safety. More biomarkers need to be selected to ensure global maxima of benefits are obtained rather than local maxima (e.g., short-term, single stressor). For heterogeneous populations, one would expect a distribution of susceptibility to these stressors, where some members could experience positive Hormetic effects and other members might experience negative impacts. In other words, generalizability to whole populations needs to be established. More studies need to be done including combinations of candidate Hormetins, and combinations of candidate Hormetins with real-world substances operating at toxic levels. Additionally, they need to be performed over the long-term, not limited to short-term, as many of the studies reviewed here are. Most of all, because of the limited applicability of animal studies to humans, long-term studies on humans would be required for these myriad combinations. This would require many decades of well-controlled studies on humans, to ensure longevity is not impacted adversely and diseases of old age are not enhanced.

https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/hormesis-an-overview-of-the-pubmed-literature-5eb72af0

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Hormesis: An Overview of the Pubmed Literature

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