Link Between Alzheimer’s and Herpes
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
>"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."
>"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.
Edit: ideally people could down vote stories. Maybe only at some super high karma?
Gandalf: 'Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.'
TL;DR: One can effectively downvote stories via the "flag". Use it with great care.
Nobody is convincing anybody, and there's not anything you can do about it, it just makes you worry so you read the story. It isn't click bait, but it is something like think bait.
People should just not make life choices based on them.
I've seen studies that show a strong parallel between people who are passive media consumers and don't self-identify in surveys as doing anything that exerts themselves mentally, and the rate of alzheimers.
Alzheimer's starts slowly and can go for quite some time before being diagnosed. But during that time, things like playing chess could already become more difficult and less pleasing so you just don't do that and resort to watching TV.
http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simpl...
Peter Thiel's investment firm threw USD$7mm at Rational Vaccines last year, but unfortunately as far as I'm aware they are mired in a legal battle since their first human "clinical trial" was performed outside the supervision of the regulators. Rational Vaccines (Prof. William Halford) developed Theravax, a live-attenuated vaccine. It operates on the same principle as the vaccine developed by AuRx, but IIRC, not quite as safely and effectively.
Aside from this, our only (as far as I'm aware) hopes are CRISPR efforts from either Editas or Excision Bio, or an antiviral developed by NanoViricides.
You'd think all the celebrities who buy $100mm mansions could do something about it (since statistically they probably all have it), but no.
If we're lucky, Thiel's investment will turn good. I'm sure his associates aren't morons and they didn't invest in a dud. Last I heard, Rational Vaccines are ramping up to proper human clinic trials within FDA regulations. We just need to wait.
Excision Bio should be running human clinical trials either next year or the following, and our collective understanding of CRISPR is expanding rapidly. So that's something to be excited about. Not that this makes waiting any less painful for sufferers.
There is no cure for HSV.
The current state of care is periodic retroactive therapy in the case of an outbreak, or continuous prophylaxis which isn't completely effective due to lack of bioavailability.
People still get outbreaks during prophylaxis, and people still shed the virus when symptoms aren't present.
I believe the drug you are talking about is Pritelivir/Amenamevir, currently marketed in Japan under the name Amenalief.
Am I correct? If so, I was not aware they are available in India for such a low price.
The fact that some individuals' immune system let it through hint that there is a more important causal issue somewhere.
Herpes may be a simple symptom, not a disease.
And maybe it's a symptom of a condition that is similar to the one that let Alzheimer’s set in.
Who knows, maybe Alzheimer's is a symptom too of a more deep, complex and subtitle disorder.
Assuming there's some preventable cause or vector, anyway.
At this point there are simple too many of these and the combinations even larger.
_If__ such things contribute to anything, we'll likely never know.
Actually, there's quite a lot we can do, and relatively cheaply, too: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-we-still-dont-hav... :
However, Clark said a phase III trial would have cost $150 million and taken three years. In the end, the company’s board and investors were “unwilling to take on the investment.”
"We" are just choosing not to do it.
This RNA serves to keep the virus latent and quiet, perhaps for years. Only when this suppressive RNA is washed out of the nucleus does replication begin.
The idea was to remove all of this RNA everywhere in a controlled manner while administering acyclovir or another antiviral. I don't know what inaccessible resovoirs remain for the herpes family. The brain would be particularly hard to reach.
Such a treatment might also trigger shingles, mono, and ks all at once if it was too widely targeted or if the antiviral wasn't strong enough.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262422871_Antigenic...
The problem is, most journalists, who filter / rewrite the study press releases don't understand the difference.
Sometimes, frankly, I'm not so sure some who publish such studies understand the difference; or if they do they don't care and publish anyway for the publicity.
File fake science next to fake news. It's real.
Probably for most of us its more important to undertand that genes are not a death sentence, they are triggered by environmental factors.
Obesity is also genetic, some persons body cant cope with the standard western diet.
But if they adapt their diet they will most likely never get obese, and get heart disease and diabetes as a result.
Your thoughts?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8327020
It seems to be plausible, that by adapting a healthy diet, at least the risk can be lowered and the onset delayed.
But my impression is, that a lot of factors, like poison from the environment (not only food and water, but also through the air) in combination with deseases, allergies and maybe medications etc, come together with genetic preconditions.
I don't think a source should be necessary for this, though I did bother to include one. Obesity hardly existed in e.g. the fifties, and that was certainly not for a shortage of food. And the individuals of healthy weight did reproduce, in great numbers. The sudden emergence of a massive genetic disorder makes no sense.
On the other hand people started becoming fat once quick, cheap, food that sacrifices healthfulness for flavor and price became ubiquitous. And in contemporary times we've subsidized the pants off corn resulting in things like high fructose corn syrup being in practically everything. And of course it would be remiss to not consider the great changes in the engineering of foodstuffs and the corresponding change in the status quo of herbicides with us also consuming trace amounts in massive quantities, as a generational experiment.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/inde...
Or is there a particular reason the study used that particular herpes virus? Is that reason scientific or for press release purposes?
If it is amyloid beta's only job, is that typical?
Without amyloid beta what danger, if any, does this herpes virus pose to an unprotected brain?
Finally, wouldn't this be easy to test / verify in humans? Wouldn't a simple blood test show herpes or herpes antibodies? And then Alzheimer's?
It also wouldn't touch latent virus, only a minority that were actively replicating.
"The bioavailability of orally administered acyclovir is limited to 15 to 30% (23), and the level of passage across the blood-brain barrier has been assumed to be low, probably due to the relatively low lipophilicity of acyclovir (8). It was previously found (14) that upon oral administration the acyclovir concentration in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is only 13 to 52% of that found in plasma. When sustained and high concentrations of acyclovir in plasma are desirable, improved bioavailability can be achieved with valacyclovir, the hydrochloride salt of the l-valyl ester of acyclovir." [1]
The nucleoside analogues currently used to treat HSV aren't super effective, and do sometimes carry harmful side-effects.
We may have a more effective treatment in Pritelivir, if this ever gets through clinical trials. It has a different mechanism than acyclovir et al — it is a helicase primase inhibitor.
It may even be true that HSV is more effectively treated when helicase primase inhibitors and nucleoside analogues work in conjunction.
“We can’t make any causal inferences” from these studies, cautions Maria Carrillo, the chief scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association. “Their findings don’t prove the viruses lead to Alzheimer’s progression, but there is a relationship, and we need to understand what herpes viruses are doing in the brain.”