Scientists find links between Alzheimer's, herpes, and head trauma

The current best effort at curing HSV by way of gene-editing out the latent virus from infected cells is being conducted by the Fred Hutch center. You can donate to their research here:

https://secure.fredhutch.org/site/TR?px=1802786&pg=personal&...

In the meantime, taking anti-virals will reduce the risk of alzheimers:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8234998/

So I'm fucked in three ways here. I get cold sores, sometimes in my nose, and as an adolescent playing Aussie rules football I was concussed seven times in two years and once more about fifteen years later (when I took the brutal sport up again for some reason).

There are some "checks in the mail" that could arrive at any time that, if I was the sort of person to worry about the future, would make me worry about the future. But I don't tend to worry, but maybe that's a symptom... I am known to have an incredibly patchy memory; some things stick in great detail, but other things are entirely lost immediately.

As an aside, sun exposure tends to bring on a cold sore 'episode'. Plenty of sunscreen and more specifically lip balm helps prevent it from occurring. But during an Australian summer that requires dedication I haven't quite mastered.

I was infected with HSV-1 as an early child (toddler age), and I've suspected it has played a role in ADHD development as well. Not to mention varicella.

> start focusing on tau

The tau hypothesis has been a thing for a long time as well. I wish we'd stop focusing on molecular indications altogether and look at the plausible etiological agents as mechanisms.

The herpesvirus family, certain gut microbiota, blood-brain barrier breaches, immune cell activity, and insulin dysfunction are all incredibly plausible mechanisms that might all somehow contribute or lead to the disease.

So, I've had this hunch since the very first studies pointing towards the herpes/Alzheimer's link and doubled down on it after the discovery of the "glymphatic fluid" system for essentially washing the brain during sleep. And it's impacted a lot of my social decisions to an almost unhealthy extent, but it's validating to see the research and possible payoff.

My hunch has always been: brain cleans itself. So long as brain cleans itself, infections like herpes and some of the bacteria involved in gingivitis can't trigger the amyloid domino effect that could cause Alzheimer's. But once that cleaning mechanism fails (head trauma), the body can't clean the detritus from the brain fighting the infection anymore. Apoe4's association with boosted hsv outbreaks factored in as well.

I'm oversimplifying it and am probably taking wild stabs in the dark, but I'm hoping the avoidance of high risk behaviors ends up paying off.

But the next question is whether this is all for nothing — if VZV (chickenpox/shingles) ends up having a similar effect... we're already giving our kids weakened VZV vaccines anyway. Seems like the longer term solutions will be:

1) vaccines to prevent hsv/vzv/hhv etc, but they'd end up being love and thus pose a similar but lessened risk

2) ensuring a way to excise the viral DNA from any of these

3) finding a means to rebuild the glymphatic membrane after trauma.

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My comment is a lot of wild pontification. Any MDs wanna provide a sanity check on anything I said?

Herpes has evolved alongside Homo sapiens for millions of years. It's extremely impressively adapted to the human immune system. In fact it can even boost the immune system (maybe in its evolutionary history it found that amping its hosts immune system helped it have less competitors?). In mice it can provide resistance to the bubonic plague

Maybe the fact that everyone has it

This is the article referred by STAT (unfortunately paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ado6430

My mum gave me HSV, she currently has Alzheimer's and has forgotten who everyone, including me is. She is 64.

Like the article says, 80% of people have herpes wether they know it or not.

Don't worry. Everyone has the virus.

What would a multi variable model look like where, say, both herpes and plaques contributed to Alzheimer, but you couldn't find proper correlation with either taken individually?

There are plenty of diseases where we have identified multiple risk factors successfully. We have examples of diseases where either risk factor alone is often causative (e.g. pulmonary cancer can be caused by smoking, or by long term asbestos exposure, and if exposed to both, fixing just one won't make the risk very low; and there are of course many other substances that can cause this). And we have also identified diseases where you need two (or sometimes more) separate factors to trigger it (e.g. shingles is a diseases that is triggered in individuals that previously had chickenpox, but generally only if their immune system is weakened by something else, typically old age).

To complicate things further, Virus can also develope symbiotic traits.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro2491

It will bear out in studies when they start to see whatever results come from giving head injury patients and other at risk groups antivirals to hopefully measurably prevent these conditions from arising

There's been enough grift in the Alzheimer's research community it's hard to believe anything

the nhs wales vaccine study is pretty solid

I know right. If polio causes paralysis then why do only 0.5% of people who contract polio become paralyzed? Checkmate.

That is mixing up necessary versus sufficient. If all people who develop Alzheimer’s contracted HSV-1 prior to developing Alzheimer’s and all people who did not contract HSV-1 do not develop Alzheimer’s (technically implied by my first statement), then you can make a good case for causality. Obviously you can do better, but that is a good start.

> That's the rub. Even if this non-traditional brain model is to be taken at face value, there is a missing variable somewhere, arguably more important; HSV-1, at best, would be a contributing factor.

Did you completely miss the point of the article and even of the quote you copied. "the latest work addresses [this very criticism you have]"?

The article tells us what the missing link is (according to their hypothesis). That's the whole point of it. It's even in the title.

> Research suggests concussions could awaken latent infections in the brain and lead to dementia

That'd be the suggested missing link, physical impact disturbing dormant virions in the brain or allowing a temporary passage to a part of the brain they're normally unable to reach.

There was a study published in 2022 suggesting that there's a link between Epstein-Barr and Multiple Sclerosis (where the immune system attacks the neuron insulation layer), and that when you get infected affects the outcome. Cleverly, they used blood samples from US service members, who have to do it multiple times in life.

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.abj8222?src=... [PDF]

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It's our first attempt at a cyborg, obviously: growing a human brain on a mycelium substrate connecting to robotic limbs.

No, not yet. Your best hope is Dr Keith Jerome’s work.