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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Assuming the working theory from one of my previous citations on beta amyloid is correct, it's the beta amyloid produced to entangle the herpes virus in the brain that's cleaned out nightly by sleep.

Edit:

Less sleep -> more beta amyloid link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16026655

Beta amyloyd -> herpes entanglement: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30526-9

None of this is definitive, mind you, but as each new bit of research comes out, a new piece of the puzzle appears to be put in place. Ultimately the question ends up being answered by a more comprehensive wide-scale experimental study tracking herpes mitigations of any sort and any possible reduction in alzheimer's occurrences, basically a larger version of this: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322463.php

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Do you have any information about beta amyloid that doesn't involve Alzheimer's? I wanted to learn about the enzyme itself. Filtering "-Alzheimer's" on Google provides no articles, merely fact sheets and ordering forms.

Honestly, the only thing I'd ever seen addressing the protein in a manner tangential to Alz was the herpes entanglement research (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26836158).

Wikipedia might have good references as a starting point though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyloid_beta

Wikipedia: The normal function of Aβ is not well understood.[7]

Most of the page is dedicated to the Alzheimer's connection. Even that quote came from Alzheimer's research.

[7]Hiltunen M, van Groen T, Jolkkonen J (2009). "Functional roles of amyloid-beta protein precursor and amyloid-beta peptides: evidence from experimental studies". Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. 18 (2): 401–12. doi:10.3233/JAD-2009-1154. PMID 19584429.

Yeah, that seems to be the older understanding. We've now got two studies pointing to the role of beta amyloid as being substantially tied to tangling either herpes virus particles specifically or potentially pathogens in the brain more generally.

Linked previously but I'll link again:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26836158 dated 22 Feb 2016

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30526-9 dated 11 Jul 2018

These seem to reference Alzheimer's only in passing or potentially in relation to the infectious theory, but they specifically speak to the action of Beta Amyloid.

These do make beta ameloid sound like a virus-net, sticking to any and all virii inside the brain. And since herpes has that time-release capsule to keep reinfecting a host user, that person's brain could have more beta ameloid plaque to clean. The efficacy of brain cleaning goes back to numerous factors, including age, hours of sleep, air quality, diabetes and other diseases, etc.

In short, it's based on number of virus infections, which herpes greatly increases. So I agree that your hypothesis is sound.

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