Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff PERVASIVE CAUSES OF DISEASE by Ronald N. Kostoff, Ph.D. Research Affiliate, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology CITATION TO BOOK Kostoff, Ronald N. Pervasive Causes of Disease. Georgia Institute of Technology. 2015. PDF. < http://hdl.handle.net/1853/53714 > 1 Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff COPYRIGHT AND CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2015 by Ronald N. Kostoff Printed in the United States of America; First Printing, 2015 CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE This work can be copied and redistributed in any medium or format provided that credit is given to the original author. For more details on the CC BY license, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>. 2 Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff DISCLAIMERS The views in this book are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of the Georgia Institute of Technology. This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention. Any information in the book that the reader chooses to implement should be done under the strict guidance and supervision of a licensed health care practitioner. 3 Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff PREFACE Why did I write this book, what are its contents, what is new, who is the intended audience, and how will readers benefit from it? Motivation For most of the past decade, I have been developing text mining procedures to identify potential discovery of new treatments for serious diseases. During this period, it became clear to me that discovery of new treatments for serious diseases, while both interesting and challenging, would be insufficient to reverse or eliminate disease. It became evident that eliminating the foundational causes of disease was at least as important as applying new treatments, if there were to be any hope for full or partial reversal of disease. Toward that end, I developed a holistic medical principle that would form the bedrock of a healing protocol: Removal of cause is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective (where 'removal' encompasses 'neutralization' in those cases where actual 'removal' is not possible). To prevent any disease, the foundational causes that underlay the disease symptoms need to be identified and removed as comprehensively, thoroughly, and rapidly as possible. To reverse disease (if irreversible damage has not been done and genetic predisposition is not a dominant factor), the preventive steps above need to be implemented as well. If the preventive protocols are inadequate for reversing disease progression, they need to be augmented by treatments. The first step in either disease prevention or reversal is to identify the full spectrum of potential foundational causes, or contributing factors, for the disease(s) of interest. It also became evident to me that much of the information required to identify and eliminate these foundational causes of disease is in the literature already, but is not being extracted and exploited adequately. There is little financial incentive for much of the research community to focus on eliminating causes relative to instituting new treatments. Additionally, extracting these foundational causes comprehensively from the literature is a complex text mining problem. I firmly believe that the Literature-Related Discovery and Innovation (LRDI) text mining approach I had been developing for more than a decade is uniquely capable of identifying these foundational causes (and treatments) comprehensively. About three years ago, I started a series of proof-of-principle demonstrations to show that foundational causes (and treatments, in some cases) could be identified comprehensively and efficiently for single diseases. In these demonstrations, I have been identifying an order of magnitude more foundational causes for each disease than any other published papers have reported. However, it became clear to me that identifying foundational causes for any one disease provides a limited perspective on the potential comprehensive damage resulting from foundational causes. To produce a deeper understanding of the health degradation and restoration processes, foundational causes for 'all' diseases collectively need to be identified. 4 Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff Moreover, it also became clear to me that many foundational causes are not seeing the light of day in the published literature for myriad reasons, and those unpublished foundational causes might be as important, if not more important, than those appearing in the published literature. Thus, not only would the foundational causes for all diseases have to be addressed in any documentation of such a massive study, but the unique text mining approach that generated these foundational causes would have to be examined in detail, and the myriad reasons for foundational causes having been excluded from the published literature would have to be addressed as well. The study identifying foundational causes for 'all' diseases was initiated in early 2014, and fully completed in 2015. Then, the issue of appropriate documentation arose. My initial thoughts were to publish a series of journal articles. One or more articles would address the voluminous foundational causes that were identified, at least one article would address the innovative text mining approach that generated these results, and at least one article would address the many reasons important foundational causes are being excluded from the biomedical literature. Unfortunately, the separate journal publication approach would have fragmented the results, and would have greatly decremented the value of an integrated interdisciplinary presentation. Producing a book allowed a full exposition and integration of the study's results and conclusions, not constrained by journal limitations. Contents The overall theme of this book is preventing and reversing chronic diseases using the holistic medical principle: removal of cause is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective. The specific focus of this book is identifying, categorizing, and analyzing the pervasive foundational causes of ~4000 diseases, allowing these actionable causes to then be eliminated. These foundational causes are based on analysis of hundreds of thousands of biomedical journal articles from the premier medical literature. The foundational causes are categorized and analyzed by discipline, as well as by the underlying main sources of these causes. There is a substantial section outlining the deficiencies and distortions of the premier biomedical literature on which this book is based. These inadequacies lead to 1) concealment of the full extent of the pervasive foundational causes of chronic disease; 2) reduced perceptions of health risk among individuals and policy-makers; 3) inadequate regulation and public health policy at the national and global levels. There is also a lengthy section describing the text mining/ information technology advances that allowed the pervasive foundational causes to be extracted efficiently from the huge volumes of biomedical journal articles retrieved. 5 Pervasive Causes of Disease Copyright © 2015 Ronald N. Kostoff Novelty While the individual direct foundational causes identified in this book are 'known', in the sense that they exist in the published literature, they have not been integrated anywhere near the extent they are integrated in this book. The new 'insights' in this book are: 1) the enormity of potential foundational causes that are possible; 2) the enormity of potential foundational causes that have to be eliminated for any person to prevent or reverse chronic disease (assuming irreversible damage has not been done or overwhelming genetic predisposition is not operable); 3) the enormity of potential combinations of foundational causes that have to be identified and researched (many of whose individual components have not yet been identified); and 4) the depth to which each potential foundational cause must be eliminated for prevention or reversal to occur. Most papers addressing chronic disease take the form: here's a symptom(s); here's what my drug can do to suppress that symptom(s), and here're some of the other symptoms that can arise as a result of my drug. They're using a 22-caliber handgun for a problem that requires a howitzer! Additionally, one chapter (#9) has been devoted to integrating the myriad approaches by which foundational causes have been prevented from appearing in the literature; these causes are therefore not amenable to identification through text mining. The potential enormity of these 'known unknowns' cannot be underestimated! I have not seen any other source that integrates the full spectrum of the types of suppressive approaches identified in Chapter 9. Audience There are three communities to whom this book is targeted. First is the 'disease prevention and reversal' community. This encompasses the public health community, medical practitioners involved clinically with disease prevention and reversal, and individuals interested