Viral illnesses may increase chances of developing neurodegenerative diseases
nia.nih.gov
nia.nih.gov
We know there are a ton of correlations. We don't have causal links, although there is quite a bit of speculation about inflammation.
I have a personal interest in this as my dad had celiac disease, refused to obey the diet, then within a few years had vascular dementia, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and three strokes! Inflammation -> brain problems feels like a natural connection to me whether through pathogen or immune reaction.
Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781
I wrote a summary in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161
Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.
I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%
Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.
If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant).
"I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.
And keeping the life vest metaphor, we are not on dry land, we are on a calm sea but still on the water.
I did once calculate how many flu shots you'd have to get to save one human life based on heuristics and data on estimated length of infection chains and R0 for flu. I can't quite remember, but it's something like 100-people-years per life saved. So 10 people for 10 years might save a life by not infecting someone vulnerable. Very approximate.
It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies.
There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best.
This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)
Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam.
Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.
I think it's both and political and belief thing, and not a rational thing, as there are plenty of educated and discerning individuals who have weird beliefs that wouldn't pass any type of smell test.
As for the it being a political thing, I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc, back when that was a political talking point on TV and talk radio. I think they know, rationally, that those types of claims are not grounded in reality, but it makes them feel good to repeat them as if they were anyway. I believe that, for some people, it comes down their perceived political opponents liking vaccines, therefore they themselves will oppose vaccines to spite them, and the rationalizations work backwards from there.
It's probably wrong to lump these religious/political views in with the nutjobs, but like you say, it isn't grounded in reality and that's a common thread. You can't reason with them either way, because reason had no part in their views to start with.
I don't think it's unreasonable to question the sanity of anyone who sacrifices the health of themselves or their children just to 'own the libs', but I suspect a lot of it is actually just blind trust in their party who stokes their deepest fears, repeats over and over that the other party is lying/dangerous, and tells them what they want to hear. I doubt very many are knowingly taking up opposing views out of pure spite for the other team, then coming up with excuses for it, but I guess that could be what's happening subconsciously.
Writing research papers at a 6th grade reading level might be literally impossible.
The last round of vaccination before covid was for the swine flu where one of the vaccines showed a lot more adverse effects than the others (7x) https://www.contagionlive.com/view/high-rates-of-adverse-eve... Also a lot of people became sceptical when they tried to get the children vaccinated for covid even though there were almost no adverse effects on children from the natural infection. It is possible to be sceptical of one vaccine and not all vaccines.
To prevent the spread. That's why.
Based on what evidence?
Isn't it now generally accepted that it doesn't prevent infection or spread and that the trials didn't study either of these variables?
The propaganda worked and that got memory holed hard, until some months ago when people were surprised to learn the testing didn't include infection/transmission.
So some of us knew the whole time, and the push to vaccinate children was all sorts of weird.
I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths.
To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.
Hopefully this skepticism won't spread to the many vaccines for diseases that are much more dangerous than Covid-19.
Does this defy logic? At the worst, I'd say I lack an intuition around it, rather than that it's unintuitive.
In this case, as others are saying, the explanation that comes to my mind is: "What kind of person gets vaccinated against rare diseases that people don't normally get? Probably one who cares extra about health and has resources to spend on it, and has a proactive and vigilant doctor." Selection bias should always be considered in correlational studies.
The integrated nature of the immune system whatever immediate response vaccination triggers probably
I also had a shoulder problem for well over a year. I think it was a pinched nerve. Went to countless physios, tried pills, stretching, weight training and even acupuncture. Nothing. Not a bit of relief, and some times even more pain.
Then I went on a two week holiday to Sri Lanka. Swam in 30C degree water. Laid on the hot sand. And basically did nothing for the entire two weeks. It wasn't until the plain ride home that I realised I was no longer in pain! I've been pain free ever since.
Sorry.. just realised my little story had nothing to do with vaccines or inflammation.
Hence causation never necessarily equalling causation...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-science-acupuncture
They found a mapping of neurons that match with how acupuncture determines location, intensity, depth of the needle. Leading to specific neurological firing enabling reduction in inflammation.
Many in our society look at the ancients as stupid because they worshipped gods or spirits. Constantly we’re finding what they discovered and said has evidence according to our “god” of science.
I think throwing away their wisdom is a mistake, we should look at many of their practices like the pyramids, trying to find what they may have seen that we do not. Not throwing it to the wayside because it’s “woo-woo”
It’s common for old ideas to be associated with accurate information without actually being true. The classical elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water might map to ice, water, steam, and plasma but they don’t explain the fundamental nature and complexity of all mater.
So no it’s not that the wisdom of the ancients it’s simply an observation by people like us that didn’t actually understand much about how things actually worked. The pyramids are shaped that way because it’s a straightforward way to build something very tall from stones. The complicated bits are all inside, and not that interesting.
Attributing motive is a careful game, but so is dismissing this as “happenstance”.
I concede though that there surely are parts that seem to just not hold water in our framework of thinking. But perspective, reality, and such are not straightforward. Hence why we need a vast amount of statistics just to say something was caused by a separate action.
I just don’t buy into the idea that we as a civilization have the furthest progress of human knowledge. Many fields we do, but there have been many periods in history where books, scrolls, etc were lost or destroyed. Library of Alexandria for one.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-07-reveals-great-pyramid-giza-foc...
As to the radio wave thing, what exact about this do you find surprising? It would be true of any large stone pyramid.
Not to mention, the typical “how did the pyramids get built with such high precision?”, they obviously had some techniques that we still today aren’t sure of, though some interesting hypothesis have come about.
At what point do we concede maybe there’s something they understood back then that we don’t today. Or something they and us understand perfectly well, but they used “lost” techniques.
It’s not high precision that caused this anything reasonably pyramid shaped using the same material works. It could also be twice as tall and you just pick a different frequency.
Personally, it makes a lot of sense to me that the immune system is responsible for much more than viruses or bacteria. The need for a class of diseases related to an unhealthy one (autoimmune diseases) is proof IMO
This is a simplification of a well researched process which we understand and can read about. What the previous poster wrote was just speculation as far as I can tell, unless someone wants to post some reference about cleaning the brain and blood?
"The spleen plays very important roles in regard to red blood cells (erythrocytes) and the immune system. It removes old red blood cells and holds a reserve of blood, which can be valuable in case of hemorrhagic shock, and also recycles iron."
Side effects and downstream effects are common across almost all drugs.
It's not absurd or unfounded to hypothesize an explanation for the correlation researchers observed. It could be the case, it could be something else or it could be the case that the correlation means nothing.
it shouldn’t be surprising that more viruses do this (the reality seems more to be that traditionally viruses that cross the blood brain barrier, like most things, result in rapid death so no real time for people to show symptoms we’d call neurodegenerwtion)
>Finally, it is known that about 80% of the viruses observed in this study can invade the nervous system and trigger the immune system’s inflammatory response.
So this fits in to the bigger picture that inflammation in your CNS from any source will do lasting damage.
So does MMR (Paramyxoviridae, Matonaviridae) and Influenza. So does Zika and Dengue and Yellow Fever (Flaviviridae) and Chikungunya (Togaviridae) and Adeonvirus, which all have very different tissue specificity, and aren't associated with long-term dormancy.
In the case of meningitis, it's not an infection of the brain, but the membrane around the brain. It's caused by lots of bacteria, as well as enteroviruses, which are most commonly associated with the digestive tract. Malaria (which is a eukaryotic parasite) causes both meningitis and encephalitis. All of these things "get into the brain".
Point being: it's not even remotely the same thing. You cannot extrapolate from "inflammation of the brain" to "neurodegeneration". It's like extrapolating from "fever" to "risk of dementia", and just because herpes viruses happen to infect neurons and cause inflammation doesn't imply a causal relationship with neural degeneration.
Herpesviruses infect neurons and cause lifelong infections by changing the expression of a variety of proteins in infected cells, thereby evading detection by the immune system. I don’t think we should brush off the possibility of such an infection having long-term neurodegenerative effects (most likely combined with other necessary factors).
No, you're abusing terminology to exaggerate. Herpes viruses establish dormancy, which is not the same thing as an active infection.
Are the viruses in the cells, somewhere, in low numbers? We don't actually know (your claim about protein expression change and hiding from the immune system is a hypothesis, not a fact). We know that viruses in the family go dormant -- stop causing visible symptoms -- and periodically recur. There's a huge leap from that to "causes long-term neural cell death and disability".
> I don’t think we should brush off the possibility of such an infection having long-term neurodegenerative effects (most likely combined with other necessary factors).
I'm not saying we should "brush off the possibility". I'm saying that it's a hypothesis, and it needs to be shown to be true before insinuating that it is a known fact.
I noticed that plants I grow in a sterile environment are extraordinarily healthy and vigorous vs those in a similar but unsterile environment. I always drew from that the less a life form has to struggle against it’s environment the more energy it can apply to growth and the more “optimal” the growth will be.
Add in the DNA level damage a virus can cause (not all viral infections of a cell destroys the cell or successfully encodes fully), and other forms of oh gosh that’s not good, tells me it’s just got a great idea to be infected.
So, forgive me, but I plan to wear masks on planes (precovid I got sick on literally every flight over 4 hours - no more!) and during outbreaks of influenza and other nasties. I can train my immune system with vaccines, which don’t actively infect my cells systemically. And the pictures of my thriving plants will be playing in my head the next time some conservative yells at me about natural immunity for wearing a mask.
Note however I didn’t say I wasn’t going to exercise are eat only hydroponic mixtures. A viral infection is not the same as adaptation stress, where the former is well demonstrated and I think conclusively good for you in the long term. So, yes, the metaphor isn’t flawless but the point remains. Some viral infections lead to a long term result of cancer, we think according to these and other research easily googled some severe infections leads to increased risk of long term poor neurological outcomes, and I posit with no proof that viral infection contributes to aging. I’ll wager an outcome of COVID will be a bulge in viral infection long term effects, and I’ll further put $5 on my statements above.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-ch...