Top all-time · #819
Eric Topol
Personal blog · erictopol.substack.comhealthscienceai
Eric Topol writes Ground Truths, a personal blog at erictopol.substack.com about health, science and ai. Since 2021, 80 different Hacker News readers have linked it 129 times, most often “The New Obesity Breakthrough Drugs: I'm not using the term breakthrough lightly”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 10 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Eric Topol's Substack for Covid and Long Covid research, and for his summaries of new health studies, AI in medicine and obesity drugs.
- Recommended for · 10 comments
- Called possibly the best source for Covid research; posts called cool, fascinating, a good dissection, and a must read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Facts, data and analytics about biomedical matters. Click to read Ground Truths, by Eric Topol, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- The New Obesity Breakthrough Drugs: I'm not using the term breakthrough lightly5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-11
- The Peptide Craze4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-08-15
- Primary Prevention in Medicine3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-09-18
- The Flawed V02 Max Craze3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-23
- A reinfection red flag (re: Covid-19)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-17
- Our Preoccupation with Protein Intake3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-01
- When Doctors with A.I. Are Outperformed by A.I. Alone3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-03
- Lithium and Its Potential Protection from Alzheimer's Disease3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-12
- The Exhilirating Movement from Treatment to Cures for Autoimmune Diseases2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-21
- The Covid Capitulation and Viral Evolutionary2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-15
What Hacker News says?
Still early in the research, to be sure. Here's the human clinical study: https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05449392 Here's Eric Topol's chat with Iwasaki discussing the finding. Topol's blog may well be the best source for Covid research out there: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/akiko-iwasaki-the-immunolog...
Comment linking /p/akiko-iwasaki-the-immunology-of-covid
on “Gilead shot prevents all HIV cases in trial”Submitted Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers as a story · 375 points
HN discussionThat might still be true if they coexist. But I'm no expert. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/omicron-is-getting-more-def... says they compete, so I'm willing to believe that. But the thread https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420195567030274 linked from there says it's not certain, and it sounds fairly convincing too.
Comment linking /p/omicron-is-getting-more-defined
on “Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study”Submitted A Turning Point in Cancer as a story · 25 points
HN discussionThis doesn't sound like a crisis? These are all recent: "How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light" https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi... "Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2... "The Long Covid Moonshot" https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i... "Long Covid is a significan…
Comment linking /p/the-indomitable-covid-virus
on “A new book shows how the power of companies is destabilizing governance”Submitted The Peptide Craze as a story · 19 points
HN discussionEric Topol has a cool post on "machine eyes" -- using deep learning to identify subtle signals in ECGs and medical images that would be invisible to the naked eye: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-amazing-power-of-machin... There are still regulatory/deployment/reimbursement barriers to cross, but this is happening.
Comment linking /p/the-amazing-power-of-machine-eyes
on “Coronary artery calcium testing can reveal plaque in arteries, but is underused”Submitted Slowing the Pace of Brain Aging as a story · 16 points
HN discussionhttps://erictopol.substack.com/p/a-reinfection-red-flag Preprint of a major study from VA data. It will probably publish in the near future and I haven't heard any major changes or revisions.
Comment linking /p/a-reinfection-red-flag
on “U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline”Submitted The BA.5 story: The takeover by this Omicron sub-variant is not pretty as a story · 16 points
HN discussionWhen it's been studied so far, AI alone does better than AI + human doctor >Surprisingly, in many cases, A.I. systems working independently performed better than when combined with physician input. This pattern emerged consistently across different medical tasks, from chest X-ray and mammography interpretation to clinical decision-making. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/when-doctors-with-ai-are-ou...
Comment linking /p/when-doctors-with-ai-are-outperformed
on “"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing”Submitted The Covid Capitulation and Viral Evolutionary as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThe WHO [1] has a clinical definition of the disease and some basic data on chance of Covid infections turning into Long Covid. Then the meta study by Eric Topol and Zayad Ali-al from last year is probably a good primer into what is known about the disease that is well established science [2]. Its not a big unknown anymore, its very prevalent, it has a lot of symptoms, it has a clinical definition but its problemati…
Comment linking /p/long-covid-at-3-years
on “Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients”Submitted The Covid Capitulation as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFrom his blog: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/some-light-on-long-covid
Comment linking /p/some-light-on-long-covid
on “Long Covid, Cognitive Impairment, and the Stalled Decline in Disability Rates”Submitted Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50 as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Once everyone has been exposed to the antigen a half dozen times and the virus is forced to mutate off of its naive optimum then the disease burden will drop even further. Then we just have another human common cold coronavirus. This is presented as a fact/certainty, however, I'd like to caution that it is still unclear whether multiple reinfections will add up to lasting damage (unlike the common cold), see e.g.…
Comment linking /p/a-reinfection-red-flag
on “We could have universal Covid vaccines soon”Submitted Our Preoccupation with Protein Intake as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe article mentions Metformin's use in preventing Long Covid. More info on that from Eric Topol's blog: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/preventing-long-covid The original study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4375620
Comment linking /p/preventing-long-covid
on “What is metformin's secret sauce?”Submitted Ground Truths on Prior Covid as a story · 7 points
HN discussionEric Topol is a better scientist than you favorite wellness expert. Here he talks about protein: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/our-preoccupation-with-prot...
Comment linking /p/our-preoccupation-with-protein-intake?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
on “Eat Real Food – Introducing the New Pyramid”Submitted The Peptide Craze as a story · 6 points
HN discussionBecause diseases are complicated and your body’s response involves a number of factors. We know that there is a large group of people who had no known health conditions prior to some number of COVID cases, at which point they did have a chronic condition, and tests have failed to link it to other known diseases. This again is similar to other things - for example, arthritis has some components like age or genetic pr…
Comment linking /p/lighting-up-long-covid
on “Long Covid is associated with cognitive slowing”Submitted When Doctors with A.I. Are Outperformed by A.I. Alone as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFigure it’s relevant to this thread - Eric Topol (very credentialed medical researcher) does a pretty good overview & summary on how the vaccines are doing. https://erictopol.substack.com/p/were-very-lucky
Comment linking /p/were-very-lucky
on “Covid-19 breakthrough data”Submitted The Indomitable Covid Virus: A major wave is occurring now as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe first article you linked to seems to agree with what the CDC is saying. The initial variants of COVID-19 were much worse, that's where the "infection lowers your IQ by 3 points" comes from, but the disease has become much more mild. "The adverse cognitive impact was worst with the original (ancestral) virus and the Alpha variant, compared with subsequent Delta and Omicron variants" https://erictopol.substack.com…
Comment linking /p/long-covid-and-cognitive-deficits
on “CDC ditches 5-day Covid isolation, argues Covid is becoming flu-like”Submitted Aviv Regev: The Revolution in Digital Biology (Interviewed by Eric Topol) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is insane again as it was just found that an infection lowers your IQ by 3 points (2 big recent studies)*. The average person now has over 3 infections to date. We aren't even far enough in the research to understand the compound effects on the brain (and body). And basically, everyone in society, even the smartest people are losing IQ points at a time when we need people to become more intelligent and aware an…
Comment linking /p/long-covid-and-cognitive-deficits
on “CDC ditches 5-day Covid isolation, argues Covid is becoming flu-like”Submitted The Exhilirating Movement from Treatment to Cures for Autoimmune Diseases as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
