6 ms·

I wonder when we'll finally accept that there's no such thing as a harmless latent disease. Chickenpox, EBV, HPV, they're all associated with either neurodegene

• matthewdgreen 10mo ago
  I looked into a chickenpox vaccine a while back, but it turns out the current varicella vaccine uses a live virus. So if you're fortunate enough not to have been exposed to chickenpox, taking the vaccine could put it into your body. The Shingles vaccine, on the other hand, has no live virus at all. But you can't get that til 50. ETA: Since someone downvoted this: I'm not criticizing vaccination, and you should absolutely get your kids vaccinated! But for someone (like me) at the age where you've seen friends with Shingles (ugh), adding live chickenpox virus to your body feels like a risky idea, even before this news.
  • wesleywt 10mo ago
    Its an attenuated vaccine, which means it was grown to be weaker then the wildtype by growing it in non-human cells making it more specific to what it was grown in. I have never had chickenpox because i had the vaccine. If had chickenpox as a child you were extremely unlucky because its completely unnecessary.
    • hedgehog 10mo ago
      It depends how old / where, the US didn't start vaccinating widely until around 30 years ago.
      • stvltvs 10mo ago
        We didn't have this new-fangled chickenpox vaccine during my Gen-X childhood.
        • hedgehog 10mo ago
          Or a lot of millenials. My parents were annoyed we had to go through it while Japan had been vaccinating since the 80s.
  • triceratops 10mo ago
    > But you can't get [the shingles vaccine] til 50 This is inaccurate. I know several people who got it younger than that after contracting shingles and recovering.
    • CocaKoala 10mo ago
      More specifically, it's highly doctor-dependent. The FDA hasn't approved shingrix for people under 50; some doctors are willing to prescribe it without FDA approval, others are not. I personally had shingles in my early thirties and have thus far been unable to have my doctor prescribe shingrix. Also, I would like to point out that having shingles was possibly the single most physically unpleasant experience of my life and boy it sure would have been fantastic to have been able to get the shingles vaccine before I got shingles, as opposed to sometime after! because wow, having shingles sucks.
      • ceejayoz 10mo ago
        This also means you may have to pay for it out of pocket, rather than having it covered by insurance.
      • bink 10mo ago
        > some doctors are willing to prescribe it without FDA approval But the pharmacies are still reluctant to administer it. My doctor prescribed it for me but when I got to the pharmacy they made me fill out some forms... because I checked the box that said I had no serious health issues and I was under 50, the pharmacist absolutely refused to administer it even with a prescription.
  • amluto 10mo ago
    We will start finding out whether people who got the varicella vaccine instead of chicken pox get shingles at a similar rate soon — the older members of this population are approaching shingles age. Here’s a study that looks good: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S470/6764830 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S470/6... The headline conclusion is: > Latent VZV can be wild-type VZV (wt-VZV) from natural infection, vaccine-strain VZV (vs-VZV) from immunization with live attenuated vaccine, or both. Based on available data in children and adolescents, the risk of HZ from vs-VZV appears to be approximately 80% lower than the risk from wt-VZV, with a lower incidence found in 2-dose as compared to 1-dose vaccine recipients [9, 10]. A major caveat is that the relevant age groups were very much too young for shingles vaccines at the time the study was published.
  • mickdarling 10mo ago
    The age gating of needing to be 50 years old to get the shingles vaccine is really obnoxious. I had shingles outbreaks twice in my life, one in my early 30's and once at 48. Obviously, both before 50 years old. I had to argue with my doctor to prescribe the Shingles vaccine at 49. And when I had it in my 30s, nobody even bothered to give me any antivirals, which did exist at the time, or nerve pain relief. After I had the shingles vaccine, nerve pain that I'd been suffering with every time I got the slightest little allergy or cold suddenly disappeared, and I haven't had it since more than a year later. If you are under 50 years old, and had chickenpox, and especially if you've had one outbreak of shingles, force your doctors to prescribe the vaccine. It costs $100-$200 without insurance coverage, and it is worth it.
    • EvanAnderson 10mo ago
      I'm 48, in the US, and had chicken pox as a child. After my 43 y/o sister-in-law had a debilitating shingles outbreak last year I asked my PCP about the vaccine. He stated that he was wary to prescribe it to be. His reasoning was something like: There was a previous shingles vaccine that didn't work very well. It was found that it didn't offer long-term protection and the protection could not be improved with a booster. The current vaccine is still new and the long-term protection and ability to be extended by a booster are unknown. Since most of the worst outcomes of shingles correlate to old age it makes sense to defer the vaccination hedging against the failure of the vaccine to provide long-term protection and to allow more time to elapse to learn more about how the vaccine works long-term. Edit: My PCP's general advice was to defer the vaccination as long as possible. He felt that 60 was reasonable. I haven't looked into the veracity of any of his reasoning, but I am willing defer to his expertise and bide my time. My sister-in-law had a really bad experience, and I remember my grandfather having a terrible experience when I was a child. I'm definitely fearful and would like to prevent it.
      • mickdarling 10mo ago
        That's your reasoned choice. I wasn't given that opportunity to make that choice. Most people aren't given that choice. That's my complaint. Especially when the delta is less than one year. That's just quibbling.
  • ikrenji 10mo ago
    I don't understand this kind of reasoning. You don't think that the 100s of PhDs that worked on this would have accounted for the riskiness of adding a live chickenpox virus vs not adding it? People need to start trusting experts more and do less of "common sense" over-thinking imo.
    • dylan604 10mo ago
      I feel a lot of people think the "experts" are conniving in their offices rubbing their hands together thinking up ways to be diabolical.
      • Nasrudith 10mo ago
        To be fair to a lot of people, the "experts" have a long list of goddamn stupid and horrific things in the past to make blind faith in them questionable at best. Most recently, COVID highlighted the elite panic where they thought that lying to people about mask's effectiveness was a good idea to try to conserve them for medical workers for earlier shortages, along with making everyone waste time with obsessive cleaning against a threat they already knew didn't exist. They decided to try to be strategic and all they did was prove that they were willing to lie and thought that they knew better than you. Despite medical ethics including what can be best summed up as "don't lie to your patients, you don't know better than them for what is best for them". Reputation is hard to build and easy to break, and well every decade there are enough events to break it even before dealing with propagandists and lumping all experts into the same basket. The experts said there were WMDs in Iraq too. Increased transparency combined with a less than stellar history means that institutions have fully earned their cynical reception. Horrifyingly is the damage that such misconduct has wrought, as even when they are actually 100% right this time people have reasons to doubt them.
    • matthewdgreen 10mo ago
      I'm in my late 40s, don't remember ever having chickenpox as a child, and I have a choice between getting the chickenpox vaccine now, or waiting til I'm eligible for Shingrix. Having seen friends get Shingles before turning 50 (and boy was it bad), plus watching some of their close family members get chickenpox from contact with them, I kind of want to avoid that stuff. But there's not a ton of expert guidance on whether the right move is to gamble on 50/Shingrix or to get vaccinated now! And when you toss in these dementia concerns, I'm even more confused. I think this would be a different calculation if I was younger, but I honestly don't know what the right move is for someone in my cohort. I decided to wait. ETA: Someone in comments above points out that the data is still coming in on this question. It looks like the best move is not to ever be exposed to varicella (maybe me?), and the second best move is to be vaccinated with chickenpox, and possibly the ultimate best move is to get Shingrix, but there's a lot of missing data and some timing problems here.
• echelon 10mo ago
  Most of the herpesvirus family have associations with neurodegenerative disorders, also including HSV. A lack of oral hygiene and gum disease is associated with nerodegeneration. Lots of metabolic diseases have associations with nerodegenerative disorders. Insulin, kidney, liver dysfunction. The gut microbiome... Putting immune or metabolic stress on the brain can cause it to go into this disease state death spiral.
  • loeg 10mo ago
    > A lack of oral hygiene and gum disease is associated with nerodegeneration. It's important to remember that association/correlation is not causality. People who brush their teeth reliably are probably more likely to exercise and do other healthy behaviors, too (avoid smoking, ...).
    • dv_dt 10mo ago
      It's also very possible to practice great oral hygiene and have bad gum disease. Gum disease seems to be carried by a potentially strong genetic risk factor.
      • echelon 10mo ago
        Oral flora is also mutable and impacted by environment and life. Kiss the wrong person (totally by chance) and you'll start getting cavities left and right.
    • echelon 10mo ago
      As nice as this statistical thinking alone is, it can also slow things down. There's a reason why this finding is valuable. It suggests a mechanistic hypothesis that bacteria are entering the bloodstream, heart, and passing the blood-brain barrier. This is a very valuable line of investigation that can lead to a smoking gun for one class of casual mechanisms and potentially to preventative care or treatment. If we blindly follow just the statistics, we'd never get any real science done. Correlation does not imply causation. But when it gives you something to investigate, don't sit on it.
• losvedir 10mo ago
  > We should be vaccinating kids against all of them rather than sending them to Chickenpox parties. We do in the US. I was kind of surprised when my now 2 and 4 year olds were vaccinated against Chickenpox, since I remember doing the Chickenpox party thing myself when I was younger (staying home with some friends over, playing Daytona USA on my Sega Saturn, I think?).
  • rootusrootus 10mo ago
    > We do in the US For now. The current administration is chipping away at child vaccines, just today removing Hep B vaccine from the recommendations list. AFAICT you can still choose to get it for your kid, and insurance should still cover it, but I won't be the least bit surprised if before 2028 some of these vaccines are actually banned outright.
    • codyb 10mo ago
      This administration does appear to be flaming out a bit at least. Seems like there's a chance the Dems take the House before the 2026 midterms. I think there's a chance Trump's term ends early.
      • rootusrootus 10mo ago
        I've speculated for a while that what he does is so over the top and frequently self-destructive that I wonder if he's actually trying to get kicked out. But while I agree that there's a chance, I think it's vanishingly small. I do hope that the dems can take the house in the midterms and put the brakes on the massive expansion in executive power.
        • rjp0008 10mo ago
          The cynic in me things the Dems take the legislative branch next year, curtail executive power but are unable to undo anything and then win a massively nerfed executive position in 2028.
• giantg2 10mo ago
  We vaccinate for many of those already. The vast majority of seniors have the shingles virus already. Only a small percentage would likely have dementia not linked to another likely cause. Just as HPV only causes cancer in some individuals. It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out all these tie back to immune dysregulation and are just triggered by different viruses in different people.
  • CrossVR 10mo ago
    For Multiple Sclerosis multiple studies have shown it is strongly correlated with an EBV infection and only an EBV infection. After the infection it just becomes a genetic lottery with a really shitty prize.
• loeg 10mo ago
  > We should be vaccinating kids against all of them rather than sending them to Chickenpox parties. This has been the standard of care ever since the vaccine became available in the 90s (US). The origin of the "parties" was that first-time chickenpox was perceived to be less harmful in children than adults prior to the vaccine, so you wanted to make sure people's first exposure wasn't in adulthood.
  • paleotrope 10mo ago
    Is getting chickenpox the first as an adult more dangerous than as a kid not true or unproven?
    • mlyle 10mo ago
      It's true -- you'll have a worse time on average and a higher chance of severe side effects. If you had an overwhelming chance of getting chicken pox, getting it in early school age reasonably seemed to be the best option.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • emmelaich 10mo ago
      Much worse. A friend died at around 35. I didn't see him at the end but he was apparently covered in pox.
  • CrossVR 10mo ago
    Unfortunately that is not the case for me in the Netherlands. No Chickenpox vaccination is offered and making sure kids get it early is still considered the right way to do immunization. The idea being that it's better for people to get it as kids, because if you give them vaccines as kids you'll have to give them boosters as adults. Whereas a latent disease will provide a lifetime of immunity.
    • yread 10mo ago
      It's not offered but you can still get it. I had to literally ask my huisarts (GP) to google it after he said there is no such thing. Luckily, he did and local hospital pharmacy had it in stock.
• cameronh90 10mo ago
  I don't have any unique insight on it, but I think herpesviruses are probably worse than we realise. They hide from the immune system inside nerves or other immune cells, and seem to have a lot of weird associations with other issues over our lifetime, particularly neurological and immune problems.
• orochimaaru 10mo ago
  I grew up in India (70,80,90) before coming to the US in 2000. I’m not a vaccine sceptic. But this sort of thing makes me cringe. I’ve had chicken pox, mumps and measles growing up. Everyone I grew up with had those. No one is experiencing dementia or any sort of neurodegeneration. There was a chicken pox epidemic in my engineering university dorm. I didn’t catch it since I had it earlier as a kid. Either way none of the people who had it are having issues. I think take the vax to prevent the disease. The neurodegenerative side effects are just advertisement for the vaccine.
  • watwut 10mo ago
    > No one is experiencing dementia or any sort of neurodegeneration. Measles specifically cause lifelong disabilities, so yes, people do actually suffer those.
  • InitialLastName 10mo ago
    If you were born in 1970, you (and presumably the people you grew up with) are ~55. The sample set in this particular study are 71-88 years old (plus 7 years after), so 16+ years older than you (years that also coincide with increased prevalence of noticeable dementia and neurodegeneration).
  • hn_acc1 10mo ago
    Consider yourself lucky. My mom had measles as a kid (1940s) and for several years had a high rate of ear infections, etc.
  • BigTTYGothGF 10mo ago
    Are you seriously still in contact with everyone you grew up with? And everyone you went to undergraduate with?
    • orochimaaru 10mo ago
      Yes - at least 25-30 people. Some more back in India but I hardly go back much these days. I mean chicken pox was pretty rampant. Everyone I knew got it - I mean everyone at some point before becoming an adult. It was just a rite of passage.
• YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago
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• quickthrowman 10mo ago
  I am part of the tail end of purposely exposing kids to chicken pox, I got them in 1989 and the vaccine was released a few years later. I wish the vaccine would’ve been available, I know multiple people that have experienced shingles in their eyes. Crossing my fingers until I make it to 50 and can get my shingles vaccine.
  • cogman10 10mo ago
    I was born in '85 and got chickenpox at 7. My parents aren't quiet antivaxxers but they also have a sort of "you don't need all vaccines" attitude (so no way I was getting the new chickenpox vaccine). I've recently had shingles and, let me tell you, it sucks ass. I thought my liver was going to explode. I'll be getting the shingles vaccine as soon as possible.