Shingles (Herpes zoster) is implicated. The whole 'lifelong nervous system infection' does seem a bit awful. I bet if we chip away at new kinds of herpes viruses, we'll find a fairly drastic reduction in Alzheimers.
"There is mounting evidence that herpes [simplex]
leads to Alzheimers", so, HSV1/2 also.
And apparently having APOE4 genome makes it all worse. HSV1+APOE4=12x risk.
Chicken pox doesn't impact HSV1/2 which a lot of people have and is also implicated in this analysis. There is, however, a doctor working on a cure and vaccine for HSV1/2 that will hopefully be available within the decade.
It's very very unlikely that chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's, both in terms of chickenpox vaccine effectiveness, as well as there are almost certainly non-VZV "causes" for Alzhiemer's.
But yes, it's quite likely that widespread chickenpox vaccine will help reduce Alzheimer's rates.
It'd probably be a few more decades before you'd expect the cohort that received childhood chickenpox vaccines to reach an age where we'd see siginficant rates of Alzheimer's. Even then, it would it'd probably be quite difficult to disentangle.
This research indicates that the chickenpox/shingles virus may be related to about 20% of dementia cases - so not all Alzheimer's but an appreciable amount.
It could be that other cases are caused by other Herpes viruses, or maybe Epstein Barr - vaccines for those may reduce it even more
The anti vax screw will probably wonder if injecting the vaccine actually increases your odds of Alzheimers since you're getting a partial version of the virus when doing so.
Similarly, there is now extemely strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr is causal in multiple sclerosis. The vast majority of people are infected with EB, with most never having symptoms. However, a nonsignificant minority aren't. A large-scale study of data covering 10 million US military service people found that those infected with EB were 32 times more likely to develop MS.
Epstein-Barr has long been thought to be a culprit in everything from MS to dementia to especially CFS. But that's a real problem: there are no antivirals developed that are particularly effective against it. EBV research has been a backwater in medicine.
Truth. I moderate a forum for people suffering from Mononucleosis and the overwhelming feeling is abandonment and fear. Granted there's some inverse survivorship bias -- people who feel well supported and educated by the medical system usually don't post in support groups -- but it's so hard seeing so many people suffering for so long (SO LONG -- years of fatigue and malaise, in many cases) for something that has basically no first-line therapy.
Is there any evidence of this? I have seen the data but it seems also likely that the same immune issues that cause ms could cause a lapse of resistance to eb.
EBV reactivation also plays a major role in ME/CFS, a condition that can affect people almost as severely as MS, but at any age. HHV-6 and 7 infections have also been implicated.
It's incredibly strong evidence that it's a required but not sufficient condition. I've seen professionals have serious suspicions that the single EBV-negative MS case from the study [1] OP mentioned was a false negative, but apparently it's not easy to confirm.
A single EBV-negative MS case. While there were 955 MS cases that developed in the 0.5M that were EBV-negative at the start of military service. You'd expect there to be about 50. That's pretty compelling evidence.
Not going to be surprised if the most common viruses are what leads to cancer and mRNA is what becomes a cancer preventative as protocols ramp against said viruses.
> An estimated 15 percent of all human cancers worldwide may be attributed to viruses, representing a significant portion of the global cancer burden. Both DNA and RNA viruses have been shown to be capable of causing cancer in humans. Epstein-Barr virus, human papilloma virus, hepatitis B virus, and human herpes virus-8 are the four DNA viruses that are capable of causing the development of human cancers. Human T lymphotrophic virus type 1 and hepatitis C viruses are the two RNA viruses that contribute to human cancers.
there’s quite a bit of active HSV1/2 work being done although it’s very early stage. a few vaccines. a cure attempt. unfortunately this virus is not seen as a target for funding. some of the labs working on these are just sub-teams of larger companies working to fight other medical challenges such as HIV or cancer. those get the funding and they are able to set side some money for HSV research.
probably because it’s thought of as a simple skin virus when more likely it’s a nervous system virus that manifests most visibly in the skin
Even if there were a strong link between HSV and Dementia, I don't believe our governments would fast track or fund such research because their priorities.
It would be nice if Gates or Elon Musk would bring the worlds attention to these issues and if something positive comes out of it would be a massive net positive to humanity.
I spent 5-6 years dealing with something like long-covid (only it started before covid). It had symptoms that seemed clearly related to an infection, but I also noticed effects that were similar to Alzheimer/dementia. Specifically sundowning.
I would become unthinkably exhausted and my mood would change drastically between the hours of about 5:00 and 8:00pm. Later in the evening, things would magically start clear up and I'd feel closer to normal.
That was, by far, the worst period of my reasonably long life, and it's still not something I'm over, I can just manage it much better. If anyone is dealing with something similar, I'm happy to talk about things that have worked for me.
I have read weird statements by people who had ALS. Some patients tell that some of their symptoms are seasonal. I am curious what worked for you?
Thanks!
> The model fit for those eligible for the shingles vaccine predicts the risk of dementia decreases with age. Come on.
Except that's not what the chart he included shows.
1. That chart shows a strongly positive age correlation in the non-vaccine-eligible group: dementia diagnoses go up as you get closer to the left edge of the chart. X axis is birthdate, not age, so the left side is older.
2. The right half of the chart shows a relatively flat relationship between dementia diagnoses and age, very slightly negative age correlation. It's plausible that more data would show a slightly positive age correlation with dementia. Visually, it appears that if you omit the 6th point on the right side of the cutoff date (assuming that it's an outlier), the trend would be weakly positive with age.
3. The charts show _new dementia diagnoses_, not total rate of dementia, and I don't think it's actually that unreasonable to think that your risk of a new diagnosis might go down with age beyond a certain point. Assuming that dementia is a permanent condition (i.e. once you get it, you have it until you die; probably close enough to true for this argument), anyone previously diagnosed with dementia would be ineligible for a future new diagnosis. So long as the diagnosis rate is positive, your probability of having dementia for a given age will be higher for higher ages. As an analogy, your risk of a new diagnosis of type 1 diabetes goes down after about age 14, yet it's not illogical to expect that a higher proportion of 20-year-olds have T1D than 14-year-olds.
I don't think the slope of the line is damning but if there are outliers that throw the slope that much off, that may be a sign there's not enough data.
Also if you change the slope the effect size diminishes because the left side of the line tips up.
This would not explain the precipitous rise in Alzhemier's rates seen in developed countries and mostly in the last few decades.
I maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
There's a precipitous rise in old people, and especially otherwise healthy old people in developed countries. All those who would have died of perhaps an upper respiratory disease or an untreated infection before they had a chance to develop Alzheimer's are no longer being eliminated early. We see similar trends for most age related diseases like cancer and heart disease. It's only natural that as we get better at dealing with diseases we can cure we would see more of the ones we can't. That's not to say there couldn't be other environmental factors at play, but a rise in Alzheimer's does not necessarily mean a rise in whatever causes Alzheimer's.
> All those who would have died of perhaps an upper respiratory disease or an untreated infection before they had a chance to develop Alzheimer's are no longer being eliminated early.
OP claimed a rise in rates, not absolute numbers. Is there any plausible reason that reducing other causes of mortality might possibly cause a rise in fraction of the elderly population that develops Alzheimer's?
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Metabolic syndrome causes all sorts of general havoc with just about everything you can think of, which would probably include neuron's ability to maintain homeostasis or fight a latent infection.
Most everyone (at least older people who never got a chickenpox vax) has a latent varicella zoster (the shingles/chickenpox virus) infection, but only a minority will get Alzheimer's. It could easily be true that varicella is causal in most Alzheimer's, but also that many of those cases would never have happened without compounding risk factors like metabolic syndrome.
We’ve had rises in herpes viruses in developed countries. Shingles is a type of herpes virus. So I wouldn’t be too quick to make that judgment. Also in an aging population, it would have to be a relative rise in Alzheimer’s, not an absolute one. I don’t know the data, so I can’t say which it is.
But Alzheimer’s is a complex disease, it may well be there are multiple factors involved. I also am inclined to think there’s something to your hypothesis, there is some data to support it.
It’s a bunch of crap. Maybe shouldn’t look for medical information from a social worker on a clickbait site.
Diabetes (specifically Type 2) is correlated with Alzheimer’s - how that makes for a useful new classification of diabetes is nonsense.
This would be about as sensical as calling nicotine addiction Type 2 lung cancer.
It also doesn’t help
> However, classifying Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes is controversial
No, not in the medical community it isn’t. That there are some crackpots and quacks out there doesn’t change that - there is not serious debate ongoing about this in medicine.
It wouldn’t be a viable name anyway as the number 3 has already been reserved/in common use in actual clinical and research practice for pancreatogenic diabetes.
>> precipitous rise in Alzheimer's rates in developed countries
Besides the older human demographics, it's certainly possible the virus strains are evolving to be more aggressive and cause problem more often. From a virus perspective, it wants to be as viral as possible without killing the host. Alzheimer's seems like a reasonable allowance.
Better diagnoses, more funding for diagnosis, more general knowledge of x, more sensitive tests for Alzheimer's. Those are the most likely culprits whenever you see a "oh no, rates are going up" headline. True for autism. True for this.
"Herpes zoster does not appear to increase dementia risk ― on the contrary, the viral infection may offer some protection, a large population-based study suggests."
If you read much of the more recent literature, you'll see that the reference you cite is an example of how wrong science can be at times. However, even those mistakes, and the healthy debates they inspire, are important for progress over time.
Sterile environments are actually bad. So what'll probably be astonishing is our lack of knowledge about how these viruses and bacteria shape our lives for good and bad.
More likely, they will be astonished that we managed to survive so long while still perceiving the natural world in a reductionist manner instead of noticing the symbiosis and holism that characterize and sustain it.
I occasionally imagine what it would be like to wake up after being cryogenically preserved, be told that they'd fixed your <top ten cause of death>, and then being given a list of everything else that was wrong with you that you didn't even know was a thing.
Well, our bodies don't work without a ton of bacteria. Its fundamental to who we are. Clearly some are not beneficial, but getting rid of bacteria in general would be catastrophic.
There’s probably quite a few specific viruses and bacteria people 100 years from now will be astonished we just lived with in our bodies, but it seems unlikely that having a lot of bacteria and viruses in general will be seen that way. I guess it’s possible that we will develop non-bacterial alternatives to the beneficial bacteria and viruses that exist, but it’s not clear what the advantage would be.
In any highly nonlinear system it's extremely difficult to predict side effects of changes like this. It's plausible there are benefits to things that seem mild or harmless and eliminating them can have dramatically negative consequences.
Summary: Wales used a cutoff date in 1933 to set eligibility for the vaccine: born before, ineligible; born after, eligible. The authors analyzed dementia rates in the populations born one week before and one week after and found a significant decrease in the vaccination population born one week after.
Given the unlikelihood of any other salient differences in the two populations (they were all born within 14 days of each other), they conclude that the vaccine had prophylactic effects against dementia and further conclude that Alzheimer’s may be caused by a virus.
The mechanisms of schizophrenia inside the brain also look alot like an inflammation or otherwise a kind of an infection immune system response, though an over-reaction. I'm making a broad characterization, of course.
The parasite toxoplasma gondii was initially noticed to be present in lots of folks with this type of mental illness (and bipolar) but there hasnt been a 100% correlation.
Massive hidden variable possibilities. Scientific discipline has been shitty for so long. It's exhausting. Beyond that, I wouldn't exactly call a 20% reduction evidence of direct cause.
- Wales imposed an arbitrary hard cutoff (1933-9-2) on shingles vaccine, giving excellent randomization in a natural experiment
- Randomization confirmed by comparison of preëxisting conditions
- Individuals born after Sept 2, 1933 show a noticeable discontinuity in dementia diagnoses compared to those born prior to Sept 2, 1933, as seen in Figure 3
- Analysis indicates a 20% relative risk reduction across several types of dementia from receiving the VZ vaccine.
This is not like the EBV–MS connection: nothing in the stats so far suggests that varicella zoster is essential or nearly so to developing Alzheimer's disease or other dementia, but it is strong evidence that it contributes to the development of dementia.
I see the theory is based on the 2 Sept 1933 birth prior and after. And after meant they were eligible for the shingles vax. But not all born after that date got that vax. So what does the data show for born after 2 Sept and vax vs no-vax?
The no-vax born after 2 Sept should be very similar to born before 2 Sept, yes? Seems odd they didn't cover that base.
The connection is probably that ApoE4 carriers clear out amyloid beta deposits less efficiently than ApoE3/2 carriers (see e.g. [1] among many other sources), whereas microbial infection can induce amyloid deposits to form in the first place (see e.g. [2]), although it's not the only mechanism which can induce such deposits.
[2] Eimer et al (2018). Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated β-Amyloid Is Rapidly Seeded by Herpesviridae to Protect against Brain Infection. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3155923
The most interesting thing that I saw was: "We find strong protective effects of the vaccine for women but none for men, and that this diff is driven by Alzheimer’s (not vascular) dementia."
I've been meaning to get around to getting the shingles vaccine. I was all set to head out the the pharmacy to get it immediately until I read that..
You have to be careful how you read that. The researchers did not find that the shingles vaccine does not protect men (from dementia caused by Alzheimer's). They failed to find statistically significant evidence, in their studied population, that the vaccine protects men.
As the preceding sentence says, this can be plausibly explained by the fact that shingles is more common in women, so whatever protective effect the vaccine has is larger and more measurable.
Also, the study was based on the Zostavax, the live virus shingles vaccine. It was discontinued in 2020 (at least in the US) in favor of Shingrix which doesn't have live virus. Unclear whether Shingrix will have the same effects, though seems reasonable to think it might.
So you're hesitating to get the shingles vaccine because you found out it might not protect you against dementia? Don't you want to be protected against shingles?
At my annual mandatory physical yesterday my doctor told me that there's a new shingles vaccine that's around 90% effective as opposed to the 60-70% effectiveness of the previous vaccine. It's a two-shot vaccine as opposed to the single shot for the old one. I turned it down, but will probably ask for it now. I got the previous vaccine a few years ago, and then got shingles a few months later, although it was a fairly mild case and I assume that the vaccination probably had a positive effect on that outcome. The funny thing is that I recognized the incident as shingles, and called for an appointment immediately and informed them of my suspicion. At my appointment two days later the doctor prescribed some anti-viral pills and said they were best started immediately after recognizing the infection. I started laughing, as did he.
No. Shingrix is the most recent shingles vaccine, AFAICT. It requires two injections for folks age 50+ or with weakened immune systems. Zostavax required one, but was withdrawn from the US market in 2020.
Yes, shingles is reactivation of latent herpes zoster (chickenpox) usually acquired in childhood. The vaccine prevents these reactivations You can have shingles multiple times, and some people are more prone to recurrences.
Very interesting. I recently watched the Michael J. Fox documentary(Still) and even he commented on an earlier infection as a teen "could've" been linked to his condition, but we'll never know.
Also having gone through two extended bouts of long covid now, I think it reactivated a family history of rheumatoid arthritis in me temporarily although I've never formally been diagnosed with it or struggled with it.
We're all just walking balls of disease causing germs eh?
The thing with Fox is that there were four people on the same TV or movie set that all wound up years later ill with Parkinson's.
But it's such a rare illness that most people who have it won't have ever met someone else with it before they got sick. For four people who all worked together to have it, it's a statistical anomaly if the disease is purely by chance.
There's a lot of weird disease stuff going on. There was an article on how schizophrenia is linked to some multi million year old retrovirus that hangs out in our genome.
This seems like a math artifact caused by splitting into two groups and then curve fitting the two groups separately. Those two curve fits don't line up at the discontinuity but there's no reason to expect that they would.
The image in tweet 8 is really the damning one. It shows a big gap, but if you fitted the entire set it'd be nearly a straight line with a tiny blip caused by the vaccine.
Yet another reason to try to avoid getting infected with diseases. A 'stronger' immune system (which is really only 'stronger' at defending against the disease that you just caught!) isn't worth the risk of long-term side effects from a chronic infection.
Immunity not having challenges, especially early in life, is a sure recipe for a miserable life full of allergies (and probably more, autoimmune problems are a vast domain).
Not sure I would want to take a small risk of topic discussed with almost sure chance of this. Maybe some form of risk is unavoidable, and part of life. Of course only till we fully crack our dna manipulation without any side effects, but thats 22nd century stuff at best.
Environmental, non-disease challenges are important to develop proper immune response. Catching the flavor of the day does jack all, and might actually prompt some autoimmune responses and lymphomas (due to the increased activity of the immune system in response to infection).
People who never acquire a chronic herpes zoster infection are highly unlikely to benefit from a shingles vaccine with respect to this sort of dementia.
It's even better to get vaccinated so that any infection has much decreased odds of becoming a chronic latent infection. Vaccinate enough people and eventually people may not get infected at all.
> which is really only 'stronger' at defending against the disease that you just caught!
if this was the case, we wouldn’t have the smallpox vaccine, or many others. not to mention the massive increase in general disease susceptibility when children aren’t exposed to these agents at a young age
I don't understand what you are saying, because it appears to not follow what I stated. (Edit: Okay, I've got it now.)
A chickenpox infection as a child will indeed help prevent against future chickenpox infections (which, for this particular virus, are indeed worse when first infected as an adult). It may have some slight efficacy against other herpesviruses, too, or it could enable a stronger disease from a related virus due to antibody-dependent enhancement. But more likely a chickenpox infection, and related acquired immune responses, will do jack-all with respect to any other infectious agent.
I recently read some speculation that Alzheimer's might be related to prion diseases like wasting and mad cow disease. That's one possible explanation for cattle mutilations also, which is a really weird rabbit hole to go down.
I’m inclined to believe that the bulk of cattle mutilation cases are from natural predators and the really anomalous-seeming cases are just from thrill-seeking sociopaths and/including bored farmers, both groups undoubtedly encouraged by media attention
to go on a slight flight of fancy, I could believe one or two (perhaps early) cases were aliens. if you’re looking down from above in certain regions, the largest groups of exposed megafauna will be cattle. what do humans do when we meet an abundant new life form? kill one and cut it up to see how it ticks.
but then another plausible hypothesis is that it’s just a slightly sick inside joke/prank amongst some subculture, playing on that observation to mess with the credulous
“ By using country-wide data on all vaccinations received, primary and secondary care encounters, death certificates, and patients' date of birth in weeks, we first show that the percentage of adults who received the vaccine increased from 0.01% among patients who were merely one week too old to be eligible, to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger.”
So only 47.2 % of the adults eligible to get the vaccine chose to get it. I am sure that those 47.2% are doing lots of health things right, like paying attention to their vaccine eligibility, for one. I imagine those behavioral differences in the eligible people who chose to get the vax and those who didn’t, could explain this pretty minor reduction in Alzheimer’s.
This would be more interesting if all the eligible adults got the vax, and all the ineligible ones didn’t.
They weren't measuring the effect of getting the vaccine directly, just the effect of being eligible for the vaccine. That is, they looked at rates of dementia by birthdate cohorts, not by got-the-shingles-vaccine cohorts.
If your hypothesis were correct, the vaccinated cohorts would have lower-than-population-average dementia rates, while the unvaccinated cohorts would have higher-than-population-average dementia rates. This wouldn't cause any measurable effect on the total dementia rate for a given birthdate, as presumably something like 47.2% of the population born just before Sept 2, 1933 would _also_ be doing lots of health things right.
That is, your hypothesis doesn't explain the data they found, which is not categorized by vaccination status, and showed that people born just after Sept 2, 1933 are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those born just before Sept 2, 1933.
Oh I see. Hmm, it’s interesting although the effect seems small enough that I wonder if the true cause is something like “if you get a serious illness as a senior then you’re more likely to decline overall and that’s what contributes to Alzheimer’s.” Since Alzheimer’s also seems correlated with lots of other bad conditions, like T2D, sedentariness, low physical fitness, poor social habits, smoking.
That was strange to me as well. More women than men get shingles, but I’m not sure whether that difference is strong enough to explain the difference in the study.
My question is: What of people who have never had chickenpox in the first place, and have never been vaccinated for it? A substantial fraction, though still merely a fraction, of the UK population is in this category. (Back of napkin calculation, more than a million people aged 60+ in the UK.)
If herpes zoster is a causative factor behind Alzheimer's, and if the vaccine merely dampens the viral load (or some such thing) in people who carry it, then people who have never had it -- and have a HZ viral load of zero -- should exhibit a dramatically lower rate of Alzheimer's.
My family history has no memory of me having chicken pox. I had shingles at around 13. I was full vaccinated and still caught measles in 2011. The ages when I was receiving vaccinations was living in rural Florida.
I have shingles in my left eye, since 2017. It didn't go away because after after a year or 2 of dealing with it, a doctor suggested I get my immune system checked. Turns out my immune system is for shit (IgG levels got down to 80; they are supposed to be 600-1500). They don't know the cause.
If you had shingles at 13, you must have had chicken pox before that, because that's how it works: you get CP first, it lies dormant in your nerve ganglia, then comes out as shingles when you are stressed or your immune system is weak.
Since you said you were vaccinated against measles but still caught them, it sounds like you might have an immune system issue like me. My body doesn't make antibodies, so I have to take weekly infusions of human IgG. IgA and IgM are also not working, but those apparently aren't as important. And I don't think there is any treatment to supplement them anyway.
Suggest you get an IgG, IgA and IgM blood test. If your levels are really low, you could be a walking time bomb like me. I was lucky and never got really sick, but while I was at Mayo, the levels were so low (80), they sort of freaked out and didn't want to let me leave without taking an infusion.
Maybe it's just me, but the avenue of advertisement of this being Twitter really ups my skepticism.
That said... my mother died with Alzheimers, I never had Chicken Pox as a kid (and I'm 57 now), but when we had our son 23 years ago, I got the vax for it since it didn't exist when I was young.
And have had the shingles vax too, since my dad evidently neither had Chicken Pox either (he didn't remember), and got it in his 80's, and then shingles thereafter. So I'm vaxxed to the hilt.
Did a quick Google search, and it appears that this isn't a new hypothesis, and previous studies had conflicting results.
That seems to be relevant and in direct contradiction:
https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/no-link-between-shingle...
While this is only a correlational result, well, while correlation does not mean causation, you really can't have causation without correlation. So it seems there are conflicting results.
Let's see if this new result holds up. FWIW I'll still certainly get my shingles vaccine once I'm old enough to fall into the recommendation. Shingles is known to be a nasty disease, and making it less likely to get is by itself probably more than enough reason to get the vaccine.
It's not a direct contradiction because it's about active shingles, not the presence or level of the virus. It could be that the virus can cause two things independently.
> We found clean, CAUSAL evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases. So, could a virus cause Alzheimer’s > YES
Not to be pedantic, but the BCG vaccine is used as treatment for bladder cancer but nobody is claiming that Tuberculosis causes bladder cancer. In order to claim that shingles is causal (rather than that the vaccine affects immune/other function), you would have to fulfill Koch's postulates or measure virus levels in various patients.
I think they said that. “CAUSAL evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents”, yes; “could a virus cause Alzheimer’s”, yes. The causal claim is for the vaccine, not the virus.
"Could be" is the way we describe possibility in English. There may be an enormous amount of evidence that tuberculosis doesn't directly or indirectly cause bladder cancer. None of that evidence comes from the fact that vaccination against TB is effective against bladder cancer. That fact in isolation could obviously be used as supporting evidence for TB being the cause of bladder cancer.
It would be great if people under 50 could get this vaccine without a prescription (in the US), now many years after it has been generally available to boomers.
This has to be one of the worst chain of reasoning I've seen and it is depressing to see this come from a Stanford Professor.
In 1978 a sports columnist joked that the Superbowl could predict the stock market. It went like this: If one of the 16 original National Football League teams — those in existence before the NFL's 1966 merger with the American Football League — won the Super Bowl, the stock market would rise throughout the rest of the year. If a former AFL team won, it would go down. This works with a 74% success rate till 2021. What does this prove? Literally nothing. The fact of the matter is the stock market and games are irreducible complex systems with thousands of factors contributing to their outcome. With such a system you cannot figure anything out empirically because such complexity will bring out thousands of correlations over any timeframe.
There are only 2 ways to make any sense of complex systems (human bodies is also one of the most complex systems we know). One is to have a causal chain of reasoning. For example say identify some protein that causes Alzheimers and we also find that shingles modifies this protein. Something like this would be the gold standard. Now even if this does not work on a person, we can be guided to deduce that some other condition is preventing the vaccine from working or some other protein is also being damaged etc etc.
If we want to be empirical we need a very carefully controlled experiment (which might be impossible even if ethical). We need two identically healthy humans, some way to induce Alzheimers in both of them and then inject one with shingles vaccine and see if it works. The fact is the medical establishment does not trust our ability to find two identically healthy humans, so we instead do this over thousands of people in a hope of extracting a causal relationship (a randomized control trial). Notice the one major aspect in this trial that the professor does not demonstrate? In his trial there is no inducement of Alzheimers or Dementia. Without that this whole exercise is meaningless. He seems to drastically underestimate the complexity of human life, maybe the group before 1933 in his dataset also did not take a host of other vaccines which actually stops dementia and not this to name a simple example.
Even worse he never tells us the number of humans being examined, if its in 100k range maybe there is a small chance that there is something here but I suspect this is in 1k range at which point this whole study is a joke, you can find thousands of correlations in a group as small as 1k humans. Heck even randomized control trials require thousands of people and this is most definitely a much worse trial than this. In what way does this create a “Clean”, “Causal”, “Without confounders” relation is beyond me and to me is a failure of the academic establishment that someone can think like this after becoming a professor in Stanford. I would be shocked if a graduate student talked like this, much less a professor.
Edit: Upon reading the paper this conclusion seems to be based on 5% of women in that period which is roughly 5000 women. Needless to say there can be thousands of similarities between these 5000 women that is not explained by the vaccine.
I did quickly peruse the paper now. If I'm understanding it right the probability of being affected by dementia goes from 16% to 12% for the 2 different populations, and it also only seems to work for women. For women it decreases from 17% to 12% while for men it stays exactly the same. With these numbers I rest my case, if this is being taken seriously by the academic community I do not know what to say. What if more women were diagnosed of dementia before that time period (because say women were generally considered hysterical) and a definitional change in dementia reduced diagnosis cases?. What if hospitals were getting funded for taking more psychiatry patients and then that reduced?. What if there was a change in a popular birth control supplement? I cannot see how this can lead to any clean conclusive hypothesis.
It's only a 75% success rate if you include the superbowls prior to the claim being made. Obviously the guy looked at the results of the superbowl prior to making his claim.
It drops down to 67% [1] when you look at only after 1978 and since 2000 its 10/23 (43%) which really implies its headed towards 50% (i.e. uncorrelated). The big difference here is that you can get outliers in your data when you have a small sample size (i.e. 50) but as the number of football games approaches 5000 those outliers go away.
Shingles (Herpes zoster) is implicated. The whole 'lifelong nervous system infection' does seem a bit awful. I bet if we chip away at new kinds of herpes viruses, we'll find a fairly drastic reduction in Alzheimers.
"There is mounting evidence that herpes [simplex] leads to Alzheimers", so, HSV1/2 also.
And apparently having APOE4 genome makes it all worse. HSV1+APOE4=12x risk.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181022-there-is-mountin...
EDIT: for clarity, the twitter thread showed that the shingles vaccine drastically reduces risk
Does this mean the chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's? How many years til we know?
Chicken pox doesn't impact HSV1/2 which a lot of people have and is also implicated in this analysis. There is, however, a doctor working on a cure and vaccine for HSV1/2 that will hopefully be available within the decade.
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MMR-V was first approved in 2005 in the US. Alzheimer’s-type dementia usually has onset in the mid-60s and 70s.
However, there are other dementias (i.e. vascular) that have other etiologies.
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It's very very unlikely that chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's, both in terms of chickenpox vaccine effectiveness, as well as there are almost certainly non-VZV "causes" for Alzhiemer's.
But yes, it's quite likely that widespread chickenpox vaccine will help reduce Alzheimer's rates.
It'd probably be a few more decades before you'd expect the cohort that received childhood chickenpox vaccines to reach an age where we'd see siginficant rates of Alzheimer's. Even then, it would it'd probably be quite difficult to disentangle.
The vaccine likely won't eliminate the virus or the existing impacts of the virus.
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I think that Alzheimer's likely has many causes.
This research indicates that the chickenpox/shingles virus may be related to about 20% of dementia cases - so not all Alzheimer's but an appreciable amount.
It could be that other cases are caused by other Herpes viruses, or maybe Epstein Barr - vaccines for those may reduce it even more
It was my understanding that shingles and chickenpox vaccination are positively correlated
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This raises a question that probably hasn't been answered yet: does the shingles vaccine prevent Alzheimers?
(Edit: sorry, I read the comments before reading the link)
"We estimate that over a 7-year follow-up period, getting vaccinated averts one in five new dementia diagnoses."
> does the shingles vaccine prevent Alzheimers?
That’s what the pre-print addressed.
The anti vax screw will probably wonder if injecting the vaccine actually increases your odds of Alzheimers since you're getting a partial version of the virus when doing so.
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Similarly, there is now extemely strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr is causal in multiple sclerosis. The vast majority of people are infected with EB, with most never having symptoms. However, a nonsignificant minority aren't. A large-scale study of data covering 10 million US military service people found that those infected with EB were 32 times more likely to develop MS.
Epstein-Barr has long been thought to be a culprit in everything from MS to dementia to especially CFS. But that's a real problem: there are no antivirals developed that are particularly effective against it. EBV research has been a backwater in medicine.
> EBV research has been a backwater in medicine
Truth. I moderate a forum for people suffering from Mononucleosis and the overwhelming feeling is abandonment and fear. Granted there's some inverse survivorship bias -- people who feel well supported and educated by the medical system usually don't post in support groups -- but it's so hard seeing so many people suffering for so long (SO LONG -- years of fatigue and malaise, in many cases) for something that has basically no first-line therapy.
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>there are no antivirals developed that are particularly effective against it.
What happened to the research into DRACOs? A few years ago I kept hearing about them, but they seemed to vanish.
Is there any evidence of this? I have seen the data but it seems also likely that the same immune issues that cause ms could cause a lapse of resistance to eb.
Antivirals probably won’t help as most infections are silent, a vaccine is needed. Moderna is working on one.
For anyone else reading, EBV is the virus behind mononucleosis.
ahhhh I'm in danger.
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Can confirm, I have MS and I got EBV about a decade before MS took me down…. It’s crazy what a tiny little virus can do.
EBV reactivation also plays a major role in ME/CFS, a condition that can affect people almost as severely as MS, but at any age. HHV-6 and 7 infections have also been implicated.
The paper mjhay refers to: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj8222
EB vs non-EB history also seems to imply distinct but similar conditions.
The evidence implicating EBV in MS is not nearly as strong as this causal evidence.
It's incredibly strong evidence that it's a required but not sufficient condition. I've seen professionals have serious suspicions that the single EBV-negative MS case from the study [1] OP mentioned was a false negative, but apparently it's not easy to confirm.
A single EBV-negative MS case. While there were 955 MS cases that developed in the 0.5M that were EBV-negative at the start of military service. You'd expect there to be about 50. That's pretty compelling evidence.
[1] https://www.usmedicine.com/clinical-topics/multiple-sclerosi...
How about HSV-1/2? Combined this virus is present in about 2/3 people in the US, and resides dormant near the brain (with cold sores).
I thought there's already a strong link with HSV and Dementia, is there any more research looking at this virus and a vaccine?
Yes Ruth Itzaki has been talking about this for years. https://www.beingpatient.com/ruth-itzhaki-alzheimers-viruses...
Potential Rosalind Franklin scenario.
https://www.healthspan.dev is making a mRNA vaccine. Sam Altman funded company.
Not going to be surprised if the most common viruses are what leads to cancer and mRNA is what becomes a cancer preventative as protocols ramp against said viruses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/
> An estimated 15 percent of all human cancers worldwide may be attributed to viruses, representing a significant portion of the global cancer burden. Both DNA and RNA viruses have been shown to be capable of causing cancer in humans. Epstein-Barr virus, human papilloma virus, hepatitis B virus, and human herpes virus-8 are the four DNA viruses that are capable of causing the development of human cancers. Human T lymphotrophic virus type 1 and hepatitis C viruses are the two RNA viruses that contribute to human cancers.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25083895/
Kudos to anyone accelerating mRNA in this space.
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do you know if this vaccine will work for existing dormant infections?
there’s quite a bit of active HSV1/2 work being done although it’s very early stage. a few vaccines. a cure attempt. unfortunately this virus is not seen as a target for funding. some of the labs working on these are just sub-teams of larger companies working to fight other medical challenges such as HIV or cancer. those get the funding and they are able to set side some money for HSV research.
probably because it’s thought of as a simple skin virus when more likely it’s a nervous system virus that manifests most visibly in the skin
Even if there were a strong link between HSV and Dementia, I don't believe our governments would fast track or fund such research because their priorities.
It would be nice if Gates or Elon Musk would bring the worlds attention to these issues and if something positive comes out of it would be a massive net positive to humanity.
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This – a thousand times, this.
I spent 5-6 years dealing with something like long-covid (only it started before covid). It had symptoms that seemed clearly related to an infection, but I also noticed effects that were similar to Alzheimer/dementia. Specifically sundowning.
I would become unthinkably exhausted and my mood would change drastically between the hours of about 5:00 and 8:00pm. Later in the evening, things would magically start clear up and I'd feel closer to normal.
That was, by far, the worst period of my reasonably long life, and it's still not something I'm over, I can just manage it much better. If anyone is dealing with something similar, I'm happy to talk about things that have worked for me.
I have read weird statements by people who had ALS. Some patients tell that some of their symptoms are seasonal. I am curious what worked for you? Thanks!
Curious as well as to what worked for you. I might have a milder version of what you have. Very similar in that it’s mainly during 5-8pm
Ben Recht is skeptical: https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/1662124696186544128
> The model fit for those eligible for the shingles vaccine predicts the risk of dementia decreases with age. Come on.
Except that's not what the chart he included shows.
1. That chart shows a strongly positive age correlation in the non-vaccine-eligible group: dementia diagnoses go up as you get closer to the left edge of the chart. X axis is birthdate, not age, so the left side is older.
2. The right half of the chart shows a relatively flat relationship between dementia diagnoses and age, very slightly negative age correlation. It's plausible that more data would show a slightly positive age correlation with dementia. Visually, it appears that if you omit the 6th point on the right side of the cutoff date (assuming that it's an outlier), the trend would be weakly positive with age.
3. The charts show _new dementia diagnoses_, not total rate of dementia, and I don't think it's actually that unreasonable to think that your risk of a new diagnosis might go down with age beyond a certain point. Assuming that dementia is a permanent condition (i.e. once you get it, you have it until you die; probably close enough to true for this argument), anyone previously diagnosed with dementia would be ineligible for a future new diagnosis. So long as the diagnosis rate is positive, your probability of having dementia for a given age will be higher for higher ages. As an analogy, your risk of a new diagnosis of type 1 diabetes goes down after about age 14, yet it's not illogical to expect that a higher proportion of 20-year-olds have T1D than 14-year-olds.
I don't think the slope of the line is damning but if there are outliers that throw the slope that much off, that may be a sign there's not enough data.
Also if you change the slope the effect size diminishes because the left side of the line tips up.
This would not explain the precipitous rise in Alzhemier's rates seen in developed countries and mostly in the last few decades. I maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
There's a precipitous rise in old people, and especially otherwise healthy old people in developed countries. All those who would have died of perhaps an upper respiratory disease or an untreated infection before they had a chance to develop Alzheimer's are no longer being eliminated early. We see similar trends for most age related diseases like cancer and heart disease. It's only natural that as we get better at dealing with diseases we can cure we would see more of the ones we can't. That's not to say there couldn't be other environmental factors at play, but a rise in Alzheimer's does not necessarily mean a rise in whatever causes Alzheimer's.
> All those who would have died of perhaps an upper respiratory disease or an untreated infection before they had a chance to develop Alzheimer's are no longer being eliminated early.
OP claimed a rise in rates, not absolute numbers. Is there any plausible reason that reducing other causes of mortality might possibly cause a rise in fraction of the elderly population that develops Alzheimer's?
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It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Metabolic syndrome causes all sorts of general havoc with just about everything you can think of, which would probably include neuron's ability to maintain homeostasis or fight a latent infection.
Most everyone (at least older people who never got a chickenpox vax) has a latent varicella zoster (the shingles/chickenpox virus) infection, but only a minority will get Alzheimer's. It could easily be true that varicella is causal in most Alzheimer's, but also that many of those cases would never have happened without compounding risk factors like metabolic syndrome.
We’ve had rises in herpes viruses in developed countries. Shingles is a type of herpes virus. So I wouldn’t be too quick to make that judgment. Also in an aging population, it would have to be a relative rise in Alzheimer’s, not an absolute one. I don’t know the data, so I can’t say which it is.
But Alzheimer’s is a complex disease, it may well be there are multiple factors involved. I also am inclined to think there’s something to your hypothesis, there is some data to support it.
I almost brushed off your message at first, but decided to look it up. You have now made me aware of something I had never heard of, thanks!
https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-is-alzheimers-called-type...
It’s a bunch of crap. Maybe shouldn’t look for medical information from a social worker on a clickbait site.
Diabetes (specifically Type 2) is correlated with Alzheimer’s - how that makes for a useful new classification of diabetes is nonsense.
This would be about as sensical as calling nicotine addiction Type 2 lung cancer.
It also doesn’t help
> However, classifying Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes is controversial
No, not in the medical community it isn’t. That there are some crackpots and quacks out there doesn’t change that - there is not serious debate ongoing about this in medicine.
It wouldn’t be a viable name anyway as the number 3 has already been reserved/in common use in actual clinical and research practice for pancreatogenic diabetes.
>> precipitous rise in Alzheimer's rates in developed countries
Besides the older human demographics, it's certainly possible the virus strains are evolving to be more aggressive and cause problem more often. From a virus perspective, it wants to be as viral as possible without killing the host. Alzheimer's seems like a reasonable allowance.
It might explain it if herpes is implicated..
> I maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
With type 1 diabetes there is growing evidence that coxsackievirus B virus is somehow involved.
Better diagnoses, more funding for diagnosis, more general knowledge of x, more sensitive tests for Alzheimer's. Those are the most likely culprits whenever you see a "oh no, rates are going up" headline. True for autism. True for this.
You don't believe that our foreign environment has something to do with it?
AFAIK the rise in Alzheimer's was well correlated with the rise in life expectancy.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/975400 is interesting and seems to directly contradict what is claimed here.
"Herpes zoster does not appear to increase dementia risk ― on the contrary, the viral infection may offer some protection, a large population-based study suggests."
The evidence in the parent study is MUCH stronger than the evidence in the study you link (and is newer).
Science advances.
If you read much of the more recent literature, you'll see that the reference you cite is an example of how wrong science can be at times. However, even those mistakes, and the healthy debates they inspire, are important for progress over time.
Sounds like we should try to eliminate all long term infections just to be sure, even if they seem mild or harmless.
I wonder if 100 years from now people are going to be astonished that we were walking around full of bacteria and viruses and thought it was fine.
Haven't our digestive system co-evolved with a ton of bacteria? Wouldn't we be pretty boned if we just kicked them to the crub?
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Sterile environments are actually bad. So what'll probably be astonishing is our lack of knowledge about how these viruses and bacteria shape our lives for good and bad.
More likely, they will be astonished that we managed to survive so long while still perceiving the natural world in a reductionist manner instead of noticing the symbiosis and holism that characterize and sustain it.
Many of the bacteria are certainly necessary. Healthy gut flora is very important. The viruses probably not.
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I occasionally imagine what it would be like to wake up after being cryogenically preserved, be told that they'd fixed your <top ten cause of death>, and then being given a list of everything else that was wrong with you that you didn't even know was a thing.
Well, our bodies don't work without a ton of bacteria. Its fundamental to who we are. Clearly some are not beneficial, but getting rid of bacteria in general would be catastrophic.
There’s probably quite a few specific viruses and bacteria people 100 years from now will be astonished we just lived with in our bodies, but it seems unlikely that having a lot of bacteria and viruses in general will be seen that way. I guess it’s possible that we will develop non-bacterial alternatives to the beneficial bacteria and viruses that exist, but it’s not clear what the advantage would be.
until then, I will enjoy my yogurt
There are about as many bacterial cells in your body as human cells, so they could just as easily say the inverse.
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In any highly nonlinear system it's extremely difficult to predict side effects of changes like this. It's plausible there are benefits to things that seem mild or harmless and eliminating them can have dramatically negative consequences.
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Summary: Wales used a cutoff date in 1933 to set eligibility for the vaccine: born before, ineligible; born after, eligible. The authors analyzed dementia rates in the populations born one week before and one week after and found a significant decrease in the vaccination population born one week after.
Given the unlikelihood of any other salient differences in the two populations (they were all born within 14 days of each other), they conclude that the vaccine had prophylactic effects against dementia and further conclude that Alzheimer’s may be caused by a virus.
Only in women, per the tweets.
Women get Alzheimer at a much higher rate, and it's not clear why. Perhaps this could be related.
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The vaccine was the shingles vaccine and it was administered in 2013.
The mechanisms of schizophrenia inside the brain also look alot like an inflammation or otherwise a kind of an infection immune system response, though an over-reaction. I'm making a broad characterization, of course.
The parasite toxoplasma gondii was initially noticed to be present in lots of folks with this type of mental illness (and bipolar) but there hasnt been a 100% correlation.
Massive hidden variable possibilities. Scientific discipline has been shitty for so long. It's exhausting. Beyond that, I wouldn't exactly call a 20% reduction evidence of direct cause.
Care to explain what hidden variable differentiates people born before vs after this exact date?
In short:
- Wales imposed an arbitrary hard cutoff (1933-9-2) on shingles vaccine, giving excellent randomization in a natural experiment
- Randomization confirmed by comparison of preëxisting conditions
- Individuals born after Sept 2, 1933 show a noticeable discontinuity in dementia diagnoses compared to those born prior to Sept 2, 1933, as seen in Figure 3
- Analysis indicates a 20% relative risk reduction across several types of dementia from receiving the VZ vaccine.
This is not like the EBV–MS connection: nothing in the stats so far suggests that varicella zoster is essential or nearly so to developing Alzheimer's disease or other dementia, but it is strong evidence that it contributes to the development of dementia.
I see the theory is based on the 2 Sept 1933 birth prior and after. And after meant they were eligible for the shingles vax. But not all born after that date got that vax. So what does the data show for born after 2 Sept and vax vs no-vax?
The no-vax born after 2 Sept should be very similar to born before 2 Sept, yes? Seems odd they didn't cover that base.
I wonder if there’s some kind of connection to the APOE4 genotype?
The connection is probably that ApoE4 carriers clear out amyloid beta deposits less efficiently than ApoE3/2 carriers (see e.g. [1] among many other sources), whereas microbial infection can induce amyloid deposits to form in the first place (see e.g. [2]), although it's not the only mechanism which can induce such deposits.
[1] Castellano et al (2011). Human apoE Isoforms Differentially Regulate Brain Amyloid-β Peptide Clearance. https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3002156
[2] Eimer et al (2018). Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated β-Amyloid Is Rapidly Seeded by Herpesviridae to Protect against Brain Infection. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3155923
The most interesting thing that I saw was: "We find strong protective effects of the vaccine for women but none for men, and that this diff is driven by Alzheimer’s (not vascular) dementia."
I've been meaning to get around to getting the shingles vaccine. I was all set to head out the the pharmacy to get it immediately until I read that..
Get it anyway, you don't want shingles.
Yeah Shingles is awful.
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You have to be careful how you read that. The researchers did not find that the shingles vaccine does not protect men (from dementia caused by Alzheimer's). They failed to find statistically significant evidence, in their studied population, that the vaccine protects men.
As the preceding sentence says, this can be plausibly explained by the fact that shingles is more common in women, so whatever protective effect the vaccine has is larger and more measurable.
The paper found absolutely no effect in men. That is to say: No trend nor indication that it might protect men.
Sometimes trends seem suggestive of a real effect, but don't rise to statistical significance. That is not the case here.
This is in Figure 4 of the preprint.
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Also, the study was based on the Zostavax, the live virus shingles vaccine. It was discontinued in 2020 (at least in the US) in favor of Shingrix which doesn't have live virus. Unclear whether Shingrix will have the same effects, though seems reasonable to think it might.
So you're hesitating to get the shingles vaccine because you found out it might not protect you against dementia? Don't you want to be protected against shingles?
You should get the vaccine. Shingles is awful.
That seems like a big deal!
Related reading on this topic: https://www.hardtowrite.com/pathogens/
At my annual mandatory physical yesterday my doctor told me that there's a new shingles vaccine that's around 90% effective as opposed to the 60-70% effectiveness of the previous vaccine. It's a two-shot vaccine as opposed to the single shot for the old one. I turned it down, but will probably ask for it now. I got the previous vaccine a few years ago, and then got shingles a few months later, although it was a fairly mild case and I assume that the vaccination probably had a positive effect on that outcome. The funny thing is that I recognized the incident as shingles, and called for an appointment immediately and informed them of my suspicion. At my appointment two days later the doctor prescribed some anti-viral pills and said they were best started immediately after recognizing the infection. I started laughing, as did he.
Shingrix is the "new" one but it's been on the market for several years.
The shingles vaccine that I got 4 years ago was a two-shot vaccine. Is this another new(er) vaccine?
No. Shingrix is the most recent shingles vaccine, AFAICT. It requires two injections for folks age 50+ or with weakened immune systems. Zostavax required one, but was withdrawn from the US market in 2020.
Is there any benefit to getting the vaccine after you've already gotten shingles?
You can get shingles again.
Yes, shingles is reactivation of latent herpes zoster (chickenpox) usually acquired in childhood. The vaccine prevents these reactivations You can have shingles multiple times, and some people are more prone to recurrences.
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Yes. Risk of Shingles doesn't decrease after an outbreak (sadly).
Very interesting. I recently watched the Michael J. Fox documentary(Still) and even he commented on an earlier infection as a teen "could've" been linked to his condition, but we'll never know.
Also having gone through two extended bouts of long covid now, I think it reactivated a family history of rheumatoid arthritis in me temporarily although I've never formally been diagnosed with it or struggled with it.
We're all just walking balls of disease causing germs eh?
The thing with Fox is that there were four people on the same TV or movie set that all wound up years later ill with Parkinson's.
But it's such a rare illness that most people who have it won't have ever met someone else with it before they got sick. For four people who all worked together to have it, it's a statistical anomaly if the disease is purely by chance.
Wow TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease
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There's a lot of weird disease stuff going on. There was an article on how schizophrenia is linked to some multi million year old retrovirus that hangs out in our genome.
Been a while since my reading on the subject, but maternal flu infection during pregnancy has been linked to development of schizophrenia, too.
This seems like a math artifact caused by splitting into two groups and then curve fitting the two groups separately. Those two curve fits don't line up at the discontinuity but there's no reason to expect that they would.
The image in tweet 8 is really the damning one. It shows a big gap, but if you fitted the entire set it'd be nearly a straight line with a tiny blip caused by the vaccine.
Regression discontinuity
Will be interesting to see the study go through the peer reviewed process & whether it will be published by a journal.
Yet another reason to try to avoid getting infected with diseases. A 'stronger' immune system (which is really only 'stronger' at defending against the disease that you just caught!) isn't worth the risk of long-term side effects from a chronic infection.
Immunity not having challenges, especially early in life, is a sure recipe for a miserable life full of allergies (and probably more, autoimmune problems are a vast domain).
Not sure I would want to take a small risk of topic discussed with almost sure chance of this. Maybe some form of risk is unavoidable, and part of life. Of course only till we fully crack our dna manipulation without any side effects, but thats 22nd century stuff at best.
Environmental, non-disease challenges are important to develop proper immune response. Catching the flavor of the day does jack all, and might actually prompt some autoimmune responses and lymphomas (due to the increased activity of the immune system in response to infection).
People who never acquire a chronic herpes zoster infection are highly unlikely to benefit from a shingles vaccine with respect to this sort of dementia.
It kind of depends?
For things like Chickenpox, it’s far better to be infected young (where it’s a mild disease) than old (where it can be quite severe).
It's even better to get vaccinated so that any infection has much decreased odds of becoming a chronic latent infection. Vaccinate enough people and eventually people may not get infected at all.
> which is really only 'stronger' at defending against the disease that you just caught!
if this was the case, we wouldn’t have the smallpox vaccine, or many others. not to mention the massive increase in general disease susceptibility when children aren’t exposed to these agents at a young age
I don't understand what you are saying, because it appears to not follow what I stated. (Edit: Okay, I've got it now.)
A chickenpox infection as a child will indeed help prevent against future chickenpox infections (which, for this particular virus, are indeed worse when first infected as an adult). It may have some slight efficacy against other herpesviruses, too, or it could enable a stronger disease from a related virus due to antibody-dependent enhancement. But more likely a chickenpox infection, and related acquired immune responses, will do jack-all with respect to any other infectious agent.
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Serious déjà vu did I not read about this study a year ago on HN? I can see this is recent in date but can't shake the feeling...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35434253/ perhaps this
I recently read some speculation that Alzheimer's might be related to prion diseases like wasting and mad cow disease. That's one possible explanation for cattle mutilations also, which is a really weird rabbit hole to go down.
I’m inclined to believe that the bulk of cattle mutilation cases are from natural predators and the really anomalous-seeming cases are just from thrill-seeking sociopaths and/including bored farmers, both groups undoubtedly encouraged by media attention
to go on a slight flight of fancy, I could believe one or two (perhaps early) cases were aliens. if you’re looking down from above in certain regions, the largest groups of exposed megafauna will be cattle. what do humans do when we meet an abundant new life form? kill one and cut it up to see how it ticks.
but then another plausible hypothesis is that it’s just a slightly sick inside joke/prank amongst some subculture, playing on that observation to mess with the credulous
“ By using country-wide data on all vaccinations received, primary and secondary care encounters, death certificates, and patients' date of birth in weeks, we first show that the percentage of adults who received the vaccine increased from 0.01% among patients who were merely one week too old to be eligible, to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger.”
So only 47.2 % of the adults eligible to get the vaccine chose to get it. I am sure that those 47.2% are doing lots of health things right, like paying attention to their vaccine eligibility, for one. I imagine those behavioral differences in the eligible people who chose to get the vax and those who didn’t, could explain this pretty minor reduction in Alzheimer’s.
This would be more interesting if all the eligible adults got the vax, and all the ineligible ones didn’t.
Am I missing something?
They weren't measuring the effect of getting the vaccine directly, just the effect of being eligible for the vaccine. That is, they looked at rates of dementia by birthdate cohorts, not by got-the-shingles-vaccine cohorts.
If your hypothesis were correct, the vaccinated cohorts would have lower-than-population-average dementia rates, while the unvaccinated cohorts would have higher-than-population-average dementia rates. This wouldn't cause any measurable effect on the total dementia rate for a given birthdate, as presumably something like 47.2% of the population born just before Sept 2, 1933 would _also_ be doing lots of health things right.
That is, your hypothesis doesn't explain the data they found, which is not categorized by vaccination status, and showed that people born just after Sept 2, 1933 are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those born just before Sept 2, 1933.
Oh I see. Hmm, it’s interesting although the effect seems small enough that I wonder if the true cause is something like “if you get a serious illness as a senior then you’re more likely to decline overall and that’s what contributes to Alzheimer’s.” Since Alzheimer’s also seems correlated with lots of other bad conditions, like T2D, sedentariness, low physical fitness, poor social habits, smoking.
I'm not sure if they are aware of all the variables. %20 reduction only on one gender does not make much sense to me.
That was strange to me as well. More women than men get shingles, but I’m not sure whether that difference is strong enough to explain the difference in the study.
My question is: What of people who have never had chickenpox in the first place, and have never been vaccinated for it? A substantial fraction, though still merely a fraction, of the UK population is in this category. (Back of napkin calculation, more than a million people aged 60+ in the UK.)
If herpes zoster is a causative factor behind Alzheimer's, and if the vaccine merely dampens the viral load (or some such thing) in people who carry it, then people who have never had it -- and have a HZ viral load of zero -- should exhibit a dramatically lower rate of Alzheimer's.
My family history has no memory of me having chicken pox. I had shingles at around 13. I was full vaccinated and still caught measles in 2011. The ages when I was receiving vaccinations was living in rural Florida.
I have shingles in my left eye, since 2017. It didn't go away because after after a year or 2 of dealing with it, a doctor suggested I get my immune system checked. Turns out my immune system is for shit (IgG levels got down to 80; they are supposed to be 600-1500). They don't know the cause.
If you had shingles at 13, you must have had chicken pox before that, because that's how it works: you get CP first, it lies dormant in your nerve ganglia, then comes out as shingles when you are stressed or your immune system is weak.
Since you said you were vaccinated against measles but still caught them, it sounds like you might have an immune system issue like me. My body doesn't make antibodies, so I have to take weekly infusions of human IgG. IgA and IgM are also not working, but those apparently aren't as important. And I don't think there is any treatment to supplement them anyway.
Suggest you get an IgG, IgA and IgM blood test. If your levels are really low, you could be a walking time bomb like me. I was lucky and never got really sick, but while I was at Mayo, the levels were so low (80), they sort of freaked out and didn't want to let me leave without taking an infusion.
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>> My family history has no memory of me having chicken pox. I had shingles at around 13
Those are the same virus. Yours manifested as shingles even though you were only 13.
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Maybe it's just me, but the avenue of advertisement of this being Twitter really ups my skepticism.
That said... my mother died with Alzheimers, I never had Chicken Pox as a kid (and I'm 57 now), but when we had our son 23 years ago, I got the vax for it since it didn't exist when I was young.
And have had the shingles vax too, since my dad evidently neither had Chicken Pox either (he didn't remember), and got it in his 80's, and then shingles thereafter. So I'm vaxxed to the hilt.
Conclusion aside, I enjoy reading research finding in this format - straight to evidence, short.
Did a quick Google search, and it appears that this isn't a new hypothesis, and previous studies had conflicting results.
That seems to be relevant and in direct contradiction: https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/no-link-between-shingle... While this is only a correlational result, well, while correlation does not mean causation, you really can't have causation without correlation. So it seems there are conflicting results.
Let's see if this new result holds up. FWIW I'll still certainly get my shingles vaccine once I'm old enough to fall into the recommendation. Shingles is known to be a nasty disease, and making it less likely to get is by itself probably more than enough reason to get the vaccine.
It's not a direct contradiction because it's about active shingles, not the presence or level of the virus. It could be that the virus can cause two things independently.
For people who have already had chickenpox/shingles, is there any potential benefit from getting the vaccine?
Shingles is the latent chickenpox you already were infected with reactivating so people who already had chickenpox is exactly who the vaccine is for.
You can have shingles multiple times, any time the virus reactivates.
Yes. Shingles is effectively chronic.
The vaccine reduces the likelihood of future flare-ups as well as their severity.
> We found clean, CAUSAL evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases. So, could a virus cause Alzheimer’s > YES
Not to be pedantic, but the BCG vaccine is used as treatment for bladder cancer but nobody is claiming that Tuberculosis causes bladder cancer. In order to claim that shingles is causal (rather than that the vaccine affects immune/other function), you would have to fulfill Koch's postulates or measure virus levels in various patients.
The effect is still interesting.
I think they said that. “CAUSAL evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents”, yes; “could a virus cause Alzheimer’s”, yes. The causal claim is for the vaccine, not the virus.
"Could be" is the way we describe possibility in English. There may be an enormous amount of evidence that tuberculosis doesn't directly or indirectly cause bladder cancer. None of that evidence comes from the fact that vaccination against TB is effective against bladder cancer. That fact in isolation could obviously be used as supporting evidence for TB being the cause of bladder cancer.
It would be great if people under 50 could get this vaccine without a prescription (in the US), now many years after it has been generally available to boomers.
Biggest fear in life for me is Alzheimer's or something similar. Looks like I'll be getting the shingles vaccine :)
Same fears for me. Wondering if there is a kind of a dead men switch for it.
So if I have shingles I'd have less chance to have Alzheimer?
BTW: I had shingles before 50yo and I vaccinated thereafter.
Good reminder to get the shingles vaccine. Never even gotten chicken pox!
I have herpes simplex. Should I get the shingles vaccine?
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This is a spam and must be taken out at once.
This has to be one of the worst chain of reasoning I've seen and it is depressing to see this come from a Stanford Professor.
In 1978 a sports columnist joked that the Superbowl could predict the stock market. It went like this: If one of the 16 original National Football League teams — those in existence before the NFL's 1966 merger with the American Football League — won the Super Bowl, the stock market would rise throughout the rest of the year. If a former AFL team won, it would go down. This works with a 74% success rate till 2021. What does this prove? Literally nothing. The fact of the matter is the stock market and games are irreducible complex systems with thousands of factors contributing to their outcome. With such a system you cannot figure anything out empirically because such complexity will bring out thousands of correlations over any timeframe.
There are only 2 ways to make any sense of complex systems (human bodies is also one of the most complex systems we know). One is to have a causal chain of reasoning. For example say identify some protein that causes Alzheimers and we also find that shingles modifies this protein. Something like this would be the gold standard. Now even if this does not work on a person, we can be guided to deduce that some other condition is preventing the vaccine from working or some other protein is also being damaged etc etc.
If we want to be empirical we need a very carefully controlled experiment (which might be impossible even if ethical). We need two identically healthy humans, some way to induce Alzheimers in both of them and then inject one with shingles vaccine and see if it works. The fact is the medical establishment does not trust our ability to find two identically healthy humans, so we instead do this over thousands of people in a hope of extracting a causal relationship (a randomized control trial). Notice the one major aspect in this trial that the professor does not demonstrate? In his trial there is no inducement of Alzheimers or Dementia. Without that this whole exercise is meaningless. He seems to drastically underestimate the complexity of human life, maybe the group before 1933 in his dataset also did not take a host of other vaccines which actually stops dementia and not this to name a simple example.
Even worse he never tells us the number of humans being examined, if its in 100k range maybe there is a small chance that there is something here but I suspect this is in 1k range at which point this whole study is a joke, you can find thousands of correlations in a group as small as 1k humans. Heck even randomized control trials require thousands of people and this is most definitely a much worse trial than this. In what way does this create a “Clean”, “Causal”, “Without confounders” relation is beyond me and to me is a failure of the academic establishment that someone can think like this after becoming a professor in Stanford. I would be shocked if a graduate student talked like this, much less a professor.
Edit: Upon reading the paper this conclusion seems to be based on 5% of women in that period which is roughly 5000 women. Needless to say there can be thousands of similarities between these 5000 women that is not explained by the vaccine.
> Even worse he never tells us the number of humans being examined
You might want to actually open the paper. N = 282,541.
They have data for 98% of the population of wales. Of the ~3m people there, 282,541 were in the relevant age bracket.
I did quickly peruse the paper now. If I'm understanding it right the probability of being affected by dementia goes from 16% to 12% for the 2 different populations, and it also only seems to work for women. For women it decreases from 17% to 12% while for men it stays exactly the same. With these numbers I rest my case, if this is being taken seriously by the academic community I do not know what to say. What if more women were diagnosed of dementia before that time period (because say women were generally considered hysterical) and a definitional change in dementia reduced diagnosis cases?. What if hospitals were getting funded for taking more psychiatry patients and then that reduced?. What if there was a change in a popular birth control supplement? I cannot see how this can lead to any clean conclusive hypothesis.
It's only a 75% success rate if you include the superbowls prior to the claim being made. Obviously the guy looked at the results of the superbowl prior to making his claim.
It drops down to 67% [1] when you look at only after 1978 and since 2000 its 10/23 (43%) which really implies its headed towards 50% (i.e. uncorrelated). The big difference here is that you can get outliers in your data when you have a small sample size (i.e. 50) but as the number of football games approaches 5000 those outliers go away.
But in support of your point: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_indicator