Large Study Finds Link Between Viral Infections and Future Brain Illness 50
Scientists from the U.S. National Institutes of Health found a link between dozens of different viral exposures and a later increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other brain disorders. Gizmodo reports: They analyzed data from two existing and nationally representative biobank projects tracking the long-term health of residents in Finland and the UK, respectively, collectively involving around 450,000 people. They looked for links between viral infections that led to hospitalization and six neurodegenerative diseases: Alzheimer's disease (the most common form of dementia), ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, vascular dementia, and generalized dementia. In the Finland data, they initially identified 45 types of viral exposure potentially linked to a greater risk of neurodegenerative illness. To double-check these results, they then ran the same sort of analysis on the UK data and found a similar relationship for 22 types of viral exposure across both datasets.
Some of these exposures involved specific viral infections, such as influenza, varicella zoster virus (the cause of chickenpox and shingles), and herpes simplex viruses. Others concerned where an infection or its harmful effects took place, such as viral encephalitis or meningitis, types of brain inflammation that can be caused by many different viruses. For some exposures, the risk of subsequent brain illness extended up to 15 years later, while the strongest link was seen between viral encephalitis and Alzheimer's. The team's findings were published earlier this month in Neuron. "As vaccines are currently available for some of the associated viruses, vaccination may be a way to reduce some risk of neurodegenerative disease," the authors note.
Some of these exposures involved specific viral infections, such as influenza, varicella zoster virus (the cause of chickenpox and shingles), and herpes simplex viruses. Others concerned where an infection or its harmful effects took place, such as viral encephalitis or meningitis, types of brain inflammation that can be caused by many different viruses. For some exposures, the risk of subsequent brain illness extended up to 15 years later, while the strongest link was seen between viral encephalitis and Alzheimer's. The team's findings were published earlier this month in Neuron. "As vaccines are currently available for some of the associated viruses, vaccination may be a way to reduce some risk of neurodegenerative disease," the authors note.
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Maybe, just a guess, it is the amount of sugar the little runts consume. Or maybe the amount of time in front of video screens. Or maybe the lack of parental control over kids. Seems to me the Amish kids are likely score low on all these and that's why the don't get autism as much.
Hey, this is fun. I can link autism to just about anything. This is exciting news. Maybe you could get a degree in pharmacology or epidemiology and get back to us on your "vaccines cause autism" trope.
Re: Trust the science. Very safe and effective. (Score:3)
Or maybe just itâ(TM)s underreported in Amish children and just as prevalent.
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Vaccines dont cause autism (Score:1)
But if they do maybe in 15 years or so the post quality on Slashdot will return to what it was in its’ glory days.
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That’ll never happen. There’s a standing offer to buy the site for two shiny pennies.
To be real I hope they’d at least give the site to the community but fat chance. It doesn’t seem like they’re making money off it like they’d hoped or they’d probably add unicode support and do other things to try and set us up for long term success.
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"As vaccines are currently available for some of the associated viruses, vaccination may be a way to reduce some risk of neurodegenerative disease," the authors note.
Ignore all the kids getting autism (but especially ignore those pesky amish kids who aren't). Our vaccines are state of the art, very safe, very effective. Get vaccinated today, before you forget later.
Ahh, nothing like an old-school anti-vaxxer to remind you of pre-COVID times.
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Studies have also linked autism to the use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) during pregnancy.
https://www.mcwhirterlaw.com/t... [mcwhirterlaw.com]
I do worry about the aluminum ion (AL 3+ -3(-OH)) as a common vaccine adjuvant (aluminum hydroxide). Aluminum in this form is understood to be a neurotoxin.
https://www.tandfonline.com/do... [tandfonline.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Donald Duck had Meningitis (Score:1)
From a Carl Barks story.
That's why he's so 'special'.
BRAINS!!! (Score:1)
So hungry...I...
BRAINS!!!
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger..." (Score:5, Interesting)
.... does NOT apply to diseases. Even common ones.
What doesn't kill you can still mess you up. Often in ways you won't know about until years or even decades later.
Our bodies' ability to tolerate and recover from damage is truly amazing, but it is not infinite.
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Viruses seem to have exploited a flaw in the human condition. Many people are convinced they will never get a bad virus, if they do they will be fine, and even if they won't they would rather take a lifetime of disability over some minor inconvenience now.
I've given up trying to help people. I only protect myself now.
Re:"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger..." (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger..." (Score:4, Insightful)
This is important when your government sees a new virus and starts down a policy of "herd immunity" before studies such as this are available for it.
(UK government, all now replaced, except the party and institutions that put you there - I'm looking at you)
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.... does NOT apply to diseases. Even common ones.
What doesn't kill you can still mess you up. Often in ways you won't know about until years or even decades later.
Our bodies' ability to tolerate and recover from damage is truly amazing, but it is not infinite.
The phrase doesn't apply to most things that can hurt you. It's something that gets used by people who want to avoid confronting things that are actually harmful and dangerous in our society (for various reasons, it doesn't affect them now, it's hard to do, they actually benefit from suffering).
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Our problem detection and correction system - evolution - does not look beyond the number of offspring you have (compared to others in your gene pool). So if you're living beyond the normal age of completed reproduction for your species, of course you're going to start coming up against problems that evolution doesn't respond to in any meaningful sense.
We need a better system. I'm perfectly happy to donate my g
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Be really careful with that reasoning, because it's drastically oversimplified. It ignores both kin selection and neutral drift. And the game theory to handle even the simple cases can get really complicated.
I mean, yeah, it's sort of true...kind of. But the results in common situations are often quite unintuitive.
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.... does NOT apply to diseases. Even common ones.
What doesn't kill you can still mess you up. Often in ways you won't know about until years or even decades later.
Our bodies' ability to tolerate and recover from damage is truly amazing, but it is not infinite.
Or stated another way, what doesn't kill you immediately or in the short term may still kill you in the longer term.
All we want is eat your brainz (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Viruses also reveal stupid people before infection (Score:4, Funny)
Without viruses, anti-vaxxers wouldn't out themselves.
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Without viruses, anti-vaxxers wouldn't out themselves.
You can say that again [imgur.com]. Funny video [imgur.com] to start your day.
What makes this even more hilarious is if these people are claiming disability and receiving payments, they're in for a world of hurt when they're investigated for fraud.
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Because that's what an investigation for fraud would imply. Whether there is a subsequent conviction (most legal systems investigate, then prosecute, and only convict after prosecution - yours may not ; I don't know your system) is likely to pivot on that "knowingly" con
We knew this with covid (Score:5, Informative)
Some people who contracted covid were found to have cognitive decline [cnn.com] associated with Alzheimer's.
“The severity of the initial disease does not predict who is going to get this,” Erausquin told CNN. “In fact, many of them had minimal symptoms – just a cold or loss of smell.”
The cognitive issues –including persistent forgetfulness, difficulty sequencing tasks, and forgetting words and phrases – are similar to those seen in Alzheimer’s patients. Erausquin noted that the parts of the brain responsible for sense of smell overlap with those impacted by Alzheimer’s disease.
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Well... that's a reckless use of the work "know". We should strongly suspect it with COVID. But it's not yet clear how much recovery is possible, or how long it will take. We know that in at least one sample of late teenagers there was brain aging equivalent to about 8 years, but late teenagers are typically entering a period where there is a lot of neural pruning going on. So it's not certain that this would apply in other populations.
However there are symptoms that strongly suggest that permanent brai
Confusion (Score:5, Informative)
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Coronavirus reactivates EBV and amplifies its promoters IIRC. I don't know much about the flu but has it been studied to see what else it causes? A lot of the things that fight EBV are very low cost- aspirin, curcumin... yet nobody is pushing hard as they were when Pfizer was making $1000/second off a vaccine that doesn't help much. Besides, with names like 'herpes' and 'epstein' who wants to study it every day? You try and strike up a conversation about such things and people shut down.
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Pfizer was making $1000/second off a vaccine that doesn't help much.
Have data showing Pfizer vaccine didn't help much? best I found is basically this, which is younger kids given a much smaller dosage being much less effective. (and other stating same facts) https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/2... [cnbc.com]
However I do know my family got covid despite having 2 shots Oct 2021. And yes Pfizer. And a chance we had again since then, as there have been plenty of minor sickness hit out house. Only so much social distancing can be done when kids goto 3 different petri dishes, I mean schools (
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I like your recommendation for lots of flavorful curries, though I'm dubious about how effective they would be. What's India's caseload like?
Aspirin is, indeed, probably a good treatment when one has the disease, as one of the effects is lots of micro-blood clots, but I haven't run across any studies confirming that. But it may not do much to prevent inflammation in the brain (if that's what's going on).
OTOH, nobody quite knows (AFAIK) just *what* is causing the "brain fog". One hypothesis is that it's
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There are a number of different variants of both influenza virus and humans. If one variant of influenza leads to a strongly increased risk of brain disease in humans with a specific but common gene variant, you'd get a result like this. We'd need to routinely sequence both people and the diseases that they suffer from and store the data to be able to nail the cause. That might come, but not yet.
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If I correctly understand the hypothesizing, there's an idea that a part of the immune system is attacking the brain, and that it's doing it because one of the attacks it makes on the virus also attacks the brain. It that case it may not matter just which virus is being attacked (depending on what form the attack takes). Everything is sort of vague here, but its got to be something that can cross the blood-brain barrier. But one idea is that inflammation of the capillary walls allows things through that
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If you read the summary, it says "For some exposures, the risk of subsequent brain illness extended up to 15 years later." Not everyone has had influenza within the last 15 years, and even with those who have you can quantify how much more risk there is for those at 1 year or 5 years than for those at 15.
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I don’t know how much luck we’ll have with influenza but the VA and NHS are gathering long term anonymized data that will eventually get fed into various maths to hopefully tease out a lot of this sort of information.
Influenza might be a tough one because everyone gets it and the kind of people who constantly get it are the same sort of people who probably dont go to the doctor much.
Re:Confusion (Score:5, Informative)
It's OK to be confused. What laughing_badger ( 628416 ) says :
is very true, but seriously understated. There are probably several hundred different types of virus that cause the symptom-set we call "influenza". We don't have enough, high precision genotyping of people suffering from influenza to be sure if it's 200, or 2000 types. It's a lot more than 20 types.
Most people (outside a small number of "common cold" research programmes) who contract an unidentified virus that produces a collection of symptoms that a competent doctor would identify as "influenza", do not go on to have samples taken, PCR'd and whole-genome sequenced. That would cost several thousand dollars per patient - which even in a "socialist" "free at the point of use" healthcare system is generally unwilling to pay for - not when the normal treatment is "painkillers, anti-snot, hot lemon, three days in bed". If disease lasts significantly longer than that, the patient's symptom set is no longer compatible with a diagnosis of "influenza", and more investigations may get started.
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IIUC, it's now "a few hundred dollars" rather than "a several thousand dollars". I think the figure I've recently heard quoted to sequence a dog was only a couple of hundred dollars. A high quality sequence can, indeed, cost a couple of thousand dollars (not several), but that's for a mammal, and viral sequences are a LOT simpler. (Viral sequences MUST be kept simple, because they can't afford a lot of the proof-reading that's needed to keep longer sequences viable. Even the short sequences tend to have
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OK, but once you've got your sequence, this looks like a job that current AIs could handle. You'd need to train one up special, if that hasn't already been done, but then it should be simple for it to notice any pattern that's increasing in frequency.
News (Score:2)
Nature wants us gone like the dinosaurs, its only a matter of would we extinct ourselves before nature has the chance.
While interesting, they're still missing the boat (Score:2)
plonk!
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