19 ms·

Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of dementia cases

• tikkun 3y ago
  That seems like a big deal! Related reading on this topic: https://www.hardtowrite.com/pathogens/ https://www.hardtowrite.com/pathogens/
• PeterWhittaker 3y ago
  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.
  • ZooCow 3y ago
    The vaccine was the shingles vaccine and it was administered in 2013.
  • wrycoder 3y ago
    Only in women, per the tweets.
    • Filligree 3y ago
      Women get Alzheimer at a much higher rate, and it's not clear why. Perhaps this could be related.
      • telebell 3y ago
        Maybe because they have longer life expectancies and are less likely than men to die in most (all?) age brackets? Their husbands have died of heart disease before they get Alzheimer’s.
        • bagacrap 3y ago
          Those sound like easy variables to control when you're trying to determine which sex is more affected.
      • _maelstrom 3y ago
        This would make sense if Alzheimer's turns out to be an autoimmune disorder. Women have higher rates of these types of diseases because the largest number of immune related genes are found on the X-chromosome, giving them a broader variety to their immune arsenal. So women are better able to fight off infections but more likely to suffer from overactive immune responses. A summary with some links: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-have-stronger-immune-systems-why-thats-not-always-a-good-thing https://www.healthline.com/health-news/women-have-stronger-i...
• CommanderData 3y ago
  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?
  • untilHellbanned 3y ago
    Yes Ruth Itzaki has been talking about this for years. https://www.beingpatient.com/ruth-itzhaki-alzheimers-viruses/ https://www.beingpatient.com/ruth-itzhaki-alzheimers-viruses... Potential Rosalind Franklin scenario. https://www.healthspan.dev https://www.healthspan.dev is making a mRNA vaccine. Sam Altman funded company.
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      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/ 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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25083895/ Kudos to anyone accelerating mRNA in this space.
      • epicureanideal 3y ago
        But why mRNA specifically instead of a protein or other vaccine? What’s the advantage?
        • adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
• jvanderbot 3y ago
  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-mounting-evidence-that-herpes-leads-to-alzheimers https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181022-there-is-mountin... EDIT: for clarity, the twitter thread showed that the shingles vaccine drastically reduces risk
  • analog31 3y ago
    Does this mean the chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's? How many years til we know?
    • tristor 3y ago
      The vaccine likely won't eliminate the virus or the existing impacts of the virus.
      • zerocrates 3y ago
        Their idea in mentioning the chickenpox vaccine is that if the shingles vaccine is effective against dementia in this way, then you'd expect an even greater effect from kids generally having gotten the chickenpox vaccine and therefore not getting infected with the varicella zoster virus in the first place.
    • xattt 3y ago
      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.
      • in_cahoots 3y ago
        Nitpicky, but the chicken pox vaccine came out in 1995 (not combined with MMR). So that’s 10 fewer years to wait :)
• drewg123 3y ago
  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..
  • teraflop 3y ago
    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.
    • A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
      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.
      • regularfry 3y ago
        It could also be that there is a potential effect that this study would have been underpowered to detect, and by chance no trend was visible in this population. That's not inconsistent, or even particularly unlikely, if I'm understanding it right.
        • A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
          (A) To suggest that the lack of effect in men is a statistical anomaly, and that there IS an effect we're not seeing. (B) To suggest that the effect in women is a statistical anomaly, and that there's nothing there but a fluke. These things, from the data, are approximately equally likely. Because there was zero effect in men -- in fact, men who took the vaccine were apparently more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, though this trend was extremely slight.
• A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  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.
  • detourdog 3y ago
    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.
    • phkahler 3y ago
      >> 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.
      • detourdog 3y ago
        I have heard it both ways. Shingles at 13 is chicken pox and one must have chicken pox to have shingles.
    • prirun 3y ago
      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.
• psychphysic 3y ago
  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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35434253/ perhaps this
• semidetached 3y ago
  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.
  • kamranjon 3y ago
    Is there any benefit to getting the vaccine after you've already gotten shingles?
    • Rustwerks 3y ago
      You can get shingles again.
    • imagainstit 3y ago
      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.
      • revelio 3y ago
        Clearly it doesn't, given that semidetached just said he took the vaccine and then within months got shingles.
        • dev_tty01 3y ago
          One counter example does not disprove the substantial studies that show a strong percentage of cases that are avoided. He also stated that he had a mild case. Trust me, shingles can be extremely unpleasant. Any level of protection from the vaccine is worthwhile.
• bilsbie 3y ago
  I wonder if there’s some kind of connection to the APOE4 genotype?
  • ABetaMale 3y ago
    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 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 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3155923
• ablyveiled 3y ago
  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.
  • hkt 3y ago
    It might explain it if herpes is implicated..
  • mjhay 3y ago
    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.
  • cheschire 3y ago
    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-3-diabetes-98797 https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-is-alzheimers-called-type...
    • riceart 3y ago
      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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lliamander 3y ago
  For people who have already had chickenpox/shingles, is there any potential benefit from getting the vaccine?
  • scythe 3y ago
    Yes. Shingles is effectively chronic.
  • imagainstit 3y ago
    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.
  • privacyking 3y ago
    The vaccine reduces the likelihood of future flare-ups as well as their severity.
• mjhay 3y ago
  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.
  • xattt 3y ago
    EB vs non-EB history also seems to imply distinct but similar conditions.
  • pitaj 3y ago
    For anyone else reading, EBV is the virus behind mononucleosis.
    • make3 3y ago
      ahhhh I'm in danger.
      • hinkley 3y ago
        We all are.
        • moffkalast 3y ago
          exists nervously
  • killjoywashere 3y ago
    The paper mjhay refers to: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj8222 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj8222
  • SeanLuke 3y ago
    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.
• pazimzadeh 3y ago
  > 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.
  • kps 3y ago
    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.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    "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.
• scythe 3y ago
  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.
• epicureanideal 3y ago
  Sounds like we should try to eliminate all long term infections just to be sure, even if they seem mild or harmless.
  • kens 3y ago
    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.
    • mkmk 3y ago
      There are about as many bacterial cells in your body as human cells, so they could just as easily say the inverse.
      • fnord77 3y ago
        39 trillion bacteria 380 trillion virii 100 trillion human cells
    • jareklupinski 3y ago
      until then, I will enjoy my yogurt
    • ProjectArcturis 3y ago
      Many of the bacteria are certainly necessary. Healthy gut flora is very important. The viruses probably not.
      • rikroots 3y ago
        Without viral help, none of us would be here to have this conversation. Retroviruses control gene expression in pregnancy - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6177113/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6177113/
        • ProjectArcturis 3y ago
• Ryder123 3y ago
  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.
  • JPLeRouzic 3y ago
    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!
  • JoshTko 3y ago
    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
• sashank_1509 3y ago
  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.
• treis 3y ago
  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.
  • selimthegrim 3y ago
    Regression discontinuity
• blastro 3y ago
  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.
  • permo-w 3y ago
    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
• briantakita 3y ago
  Will be interesting to see the study go through the peer reviewed process & whether it will be published by a journal.
• wonderwonder 3y ago
  Biggest fear in life for me is Alzheimer's or something similar. Looks like I'll be getting the shingles vaccine :)
  • notdang 3y ago
    Same fears for me. Wondering if there is a kind of a dead men switch for it.
• epaulson 3y ago
  Ben Recht is skeptical: https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/1662124696186544128 https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/1662124696186544128
  • meatmanek 3y ago
    > 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.
    • bagacrap 3y ago
      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.
• syngrog66 3y ago
  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.
• ghoogl 3y ago
  [dead]
• marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I have herpes simplex. Should I get the shingles vaccine?
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  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.
• anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  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.
  • permo-w 3y ago
    > 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
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      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.
      • meatmanek 3y ago
        > The smallpox vaccine is the first vaccine to have been developed against a contagious disease. In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner demonstrated that an infection with the relatively mild cowpox virus conferred immunity against the deadly smallpox virus. Cowpox served as a natural vaccine until the modern smallpox vaccine emerged in the 20th century. ... > The term vaccine derives from the Latin word for cow, reflecting the origins of smallpox vaccination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine
      • permo-w 3y ago
• hannob 3y ago
  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-shingles-and-dementia-risk/ 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.
  • kps 3y ago
    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.
• thenerdhead 3y ago
  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?
  • tim333 3y ago
    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.
    • el_benhameen 3y ago
      Been a while since my reading on the subject, but maternal flu infection during pregnancy has been linked to development of schizophrenia, too.
  • mabbo 3y ago
    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.
    • thenerdhead 3y ago
      Wow TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease
      • mabbo 3y ago
        > When asked about the cluster by Howard Stern in a September 25, 2013, interview on The Howard Stern Show, Michael J. Fox stated, "Believe it or not, from a scientific point of view, that's not significant." I thought Fox wasn't being accurate, but if you do the math on that, he's not wrong. Parkinson's hits about 1 in 300 (0.33%), and that cast saw 4 out of 125 (3.2%). That sounds like it's a crazy amount more, but if you pop those numbers into an A/B test calculator, it's borderline whether you consider it significant or not, because the small sample size really reduces the statistical power. It's definitely interesting but it's not wrong to say that it isn't significant by some statistical measures.
• loeg 3y ago
  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.
• neves 3y ago
  So if I have shingles I'd have less chance to have Alzheimer? BTW: I had shingles before 50yo and I vaccinated thereafter.
• nahnahg 3y ago
  [dead]
• 0xcafefood 3y ago
  https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/975400 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."
  • Quarrel 3y ago
    The evidence in the parent study is MUCH stronger than the evidence in the study you link (and is newer). Science advances.
  • dev_tty01 3y ago
    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.
• justinator 3y ago
  Good reminder to get the shingles vaccine. Never even gotten chicken pox!
• telebell 3y ago
  “ 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?
  • meatmanek 3y ago
    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.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • telebell 3y ago
      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.
• mnming 3y ago
  Conclusion aside, I enjoy reading research finding in this format - straight to evidence, short.
• mrangle 3y ago
  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.
  • bagacrap 3y ago
    Care to explain what hidden variable differentiates people born before vs after this exact date?
• annilt 3y ago
  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.
  • actuallyalys 3y ago
    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.
• Susanshaw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • navigate8310 3y ago
    This is a spam and must be taken out at once.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  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.