3 ms·
These headlines are horrible. The actual story is about "Amyloid Beta, the substance currently thought to cause Alzheimer's, may actually protect against Alzhei
by nonbel 8y ago
These headlines are horrible. The actual story is about "Amyloid Beta, the substance currently thought to cause Alzheimer's, may actually protect against Alzheimer's and herpes".
>"Robert Moir, a neurologist at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, says that many researchers have cast it as a villainous molecule with no beneficial function. “It’s just bad, bad, bad,” he says. “But it has become increasingly obvious that this isn’t true.” Moir thinks that amyloid beta has a more heroic role, as a foot soldier of our immune system. It protects neurons from infectious microbes—and from herpes viruses, in particular."
- LordDragonfang 8y agoFurther down in the article: >"In the past three decades, more than 100 papers have described correlations between the presence of HSV–1 and the risk of Alzheimer’s... Most recently, Ben Readhead and his colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed that two herpes viruses, HHV–6A and HHV–7, were more common in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients than in those of healthy people." And the article continues to point out the links, though hedges as to whether it is a causal link or not in either direction.
- nonbel 8y agoThe presence of a correlation isnt the interesting part of the story (as noted by others, what isnt correlated with Alzheimer's?), so should not be highlighted in the headline. The interesting part is the proposal that amyloid beta is protective.