8 ms·
Viral illnesses may increase chances of developing neurodegenerative diseases
- world-set-free 4y agoI was hoping there was some mention of the international zombie apocalpyse alert level.
- luisapic 4y ago[dead]
- _Microft 4y agoThe submitted link is broken for me. This one works: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-chances-developing-alzheimers-or-other-neurodegenerative-disease https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-ch...
- dang 4y agoChanged from https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-chances-developing-alzheimers-or-other-neurodegenerative-diseasep/ https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-ch.... Thanks!
- _Microft 4y agoRelated: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and not developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinations against diseases that people normally do not get. This hints at a reason other than simply „avoided disease“. Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781 I wrote a summary in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161
- teruakohatu 4y agoI would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic. Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.
- dboreham 4y agoPeople who seek vaccination may have a higher than average interest in their own health. This may cause them to live longer.
- mathieuh 4y agoIsn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? My whole life until Covid I knew of one person whose parents hadn’t got him routinely vaccinated, everyone in my circle found that very strange and as soon as he was able he did it himself. I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%
- Enginerrrd 4y agoNot necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time. Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.
- michaelterryio 4y agoYou don’t have to do anything to avoid flu vaccines. I “avoid” them because you have to waste precious time and I never get sick and I don’t like the experience of getting shots.
- nullfield 4y agoI mean, they're a mess of "we're gonna guess which...this year", which seems really un-amusing - why can't they produce a series of shots that cover all the variants that they have any idea might be circulating, if they're so dangerous? We have to assume it's "because they're making a calculated risk assessment, weighing the benefits against the cost". If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant). "I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.
- ccleve 4y agoThere's a lot more to the relationship between pathogens and neurological conditions. This article has some good information: https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/ https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/ (Please ignore the clickbaity tone, there's actually good stuff here). We know there are a ton of correlations. We don't have causal links, although there is quite a bit of speculation about inflammation.
- petercooper 4y agoNot related to a pathogen, but there have been studies in seeing if untackled celiac disease causes dementia through inflammation: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/sheffield-coeliac-disease-brain-damage-1.882611 https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/sheffield-coeliac-diseas... I have a personal interest in this as my dad had celiac disease, refused to obey the diet, then within a few years had vascular dementia, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and three strokes! Inflammation -> brain problems feels like a natural connection to me whether through pathogen or immune reaction.
- soulofmischief 4y agoI've had issues with inflammation for most of my life and this line of thinking has always worried me. I just had to do a full blood panel last week for a new doctor in my quest to understand the inflammation throughout my body. I have been feeling less and less mentally acute lately and I wonder if the inflammation is finally having a neurological effect.
- rcme 4y agoMany who have had chicken pox still have the virus living dormant in their neurons. The virus can randomly reactivate and causes a painful skin lesions called shingles.
- timr 4y agoYes, but "living in neurons" != "living in the brain" != "causes neurodegenerative disease", which seems to be the implication being drawn here.
- meindnoch 4y agoHerpesviruses (which includes VZV, the chickenpox virus) sometimes cause recurring meningitis and encephalitis. They do get into the brain. We just don’t know how.
- timr 4y ago> Herpesviruses (which includes VZV, the chickenpox virus) sometimes cause recurring meningitis and encephalitis. They do get into the brain. We just don’t know how. So does MMR (Paramyxoviridae, Matonaviridae) and Influenza. So does Zika and Dengue and Yellow Fever (Flaviviridae) and Chikungunya (Togaviridae) and Adeonvirus, which all have very different tissue specificity, and aren't associated with long-term dormancy. In the case of meningitis, it's not an infection of the brain, but the membrane around the brain. It's caused by lots of bacteria, as well as enteroviruses, which are most commonly associated with the digestive tract. Malaria (which is a eukaryotic parasite) causes both meningitis and encephalitis. All of these things "get into the brain". Point being: it's not even remotely the same thing. You cannot extrapolate from "inflammation of the brain" to "neurodegeneration". It's like extrapolating from "fever" to "risk of dementia", and just because herpes viruses happen to infect neurons and cause inflammation doesn't imply a causal relationship with neural degeneration.
- meindnoch 4y ago>just because herpes viruses happen to infect neurons and cause inflammation doesn't imply a causal relationship with neural degeneration Herpesviruses infect neurons and cause lifelong infections by changing the expression of a variety of proteins in infected cells, thereby evading detection by the immune system. I don’t think we should brush off the possibility of such an infection having long-term neurodegenerative effects (most likely combined with other necessary factors).
- olliej 4y agoWhat is this “may” - syphilis has been known to do this fairly directly for a long time, long before Tuskegee or anything like that. it shouldn’t be surprising that more viruses do this (the reality seems more to be that traditionally viruses that cross the blood brain barrier, like most things, result in rapid death so no real time for people to show symptoms we’d call neurodegenerwtion)
- whatshisface 4y agoSyphilis is a bacterial infection that grows, among other places, in your brain. Pneumonia viruses live inside your airways, and if anything happens in your brain it's because of the immune system doing something bad. They are very different things. In particular, >Finally, it is known that about 80% of the viruses observed in this study can invade the nervous system and trigger the immune system’s inflammatory response. So this fits in to the bigger picture that inflammation in your CNS from any source will do lasting damage.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoGuess the whole “roll around in viral soup and lick the elevator buttons” crowd arguing getting sick is healthy as it boosts your immune system is going to have a relatively sad old age. I noticed that plants I grow in a sterile environment are extraordinarily healthy and vigorous vs those in a similar but unsterile environment. I always drew from that the less a life form has to struggle against it’s environment the more energy it can apply to growth and the more “optimal” the growth will be. Add in the DNA level damage a virus can cause (not all viral infections of a cell destroys the cell or successfully encodes fully), and other forms of oh gosh that’s not good, tells me it’s just got a great idea to be infected. So, forgive me, but I plan to wear masks on planes (precovid I got sick on literally every flight over 4 hours - no more!) and during outbreaks of influenza and other nasties. I can train my immune system with vaccines, which don’t actively infect my cells systemically. And the pictures of my thriving plants will be playing in my head the next time some conservative yells at me about natural immunity for wearing a mask.
- canadiantim 4y agoPlants need many stressors to survive. Like wind, a plant grown in a sterile windless environment is guaranteed to be weaker than a plant grown with some wind to convince it to invest energy in stabilizing itself.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoYes that’s true, they were much less woody despite being more lush and bearing larger and sweeter fruit, and I had to provide stability support to some. Note however I didn’t say I wasn’t going to exercise are eat only hydroponic mixtures. A viral infection is not the same as adaptation stress, where the former is well demonstrated and I think conclusively good for you in the long term. So, yes, the metaphor isn’t flawless but the point remains. Some viral infections lead to a long term result of cancer, we think according to these and other research easily googled some severe infections leads to increased risk of long term poor neurological outcomes, and I posit with no proof that viral infection contributes to aging. I’ll wager an outcome of COVID will be a bulge in viral infection long term effects, and I’ll further put $5 on my statements above.