[HN Gopher] Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good c...
___________________________________________________________________
Evidence that the shingles vaccine prevents a good chunk of
dementia cases
Author : guiambros
Score : 491 points
Date : 2023-05-26 13:11 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| bilsbie wrote:
| I wonder if there's some kind of connection to the APOE4
| genotype?
| ABetaMale wrote:
| The connection is probably that ApoE4 carriers clear out
| amyloid beta deposits less efficiently than ApoE3/2 carriers
| (see e.g. [1] among many other sources), whereas microbial
| infection can induce amyloid deposits to form in the first
| place (see e.g. [2]), although it's not the only mechanism
| which can induce such deposits.
|
| [1] Castellano et al (2011). Human apoE Isoforms Differentially
| Regulate Brain Amyloid-b Peptide Clearance.
| https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3002156
|
| [2] Eimer et al (2018). Alzheimer's Disease-Associated
| b-Amyloid Is Rapidly Seeded by Herpesviridae to Protect against
| Brain Infection. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3155923
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Biggest fear in life for me is Alzheimer's or something similar.
| Looks like I'll be getting the shingles vaccine :)
| notdang wrote:
| Same fears for me. Wondering if there is a kind of a dead men
| switch for it.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Sounds like we should try to eliminate all long term infections
| just to be sure, even if they seem mild or harmless.
| DuckFeathers wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| kens wrote:
| I wonder if 100 years from now people are going to be
| astonished that we were walking around full of bacteria and
| viruses and thought it was fine.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Many of the bacteria are certainly necessary. Healthy gut
| flora is very important. The viruses probably not.
| rikroots wrote:
| Without viral help, none of us would be here to have this
| conversation.
|
| Retroviruses control gene expression in pregnancy -
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6177113/
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| I had never heard of endogenous retroviruses before! They
| raise the question: if a virus writes itself into the
| genome, is it even a virus anymore?
| monktastic1 wrote:
| More likely, they will be astonished that we managed to
| survive so long while still perceiving the natural world in a
| reductionist manner instead of noticing the symbiosis and
| holism that characterize and sustain it.
| hhjinks wrote:
| Haven't our digestive system co-evolved with a ton of
| bacteria? Wouldn't we be pretty boned if we just kicked them
| to the crub?
| permo-w wrote:
| going beyond this, complete speculation but I wouldn't be
| surprised if there can be benefits to these long-term viral
| infections alongside their harms
|
| perhaps improving immune protection against more
| immediately harmful viruses, for example
|
| IANAD though. I could be completely wrong
| debacle wrote:
| Yes, and having the right bacteria in the wrong place, or
| too much of the right bacteria, can be life threatening.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| Sterile environments are actually bad. So what'll probably be
| astonishing is our lack of knowledge about how these viruses
| and bacteria shape our lives for good and bad.
| mkmk wrote:
| There are about as many bacterial cells in your body as human
| cells, so they could just as easily say the inverse.
| fnord77 wrote:
| 39 trillion bacteria 380 trillion virii 100 trillion human
| cells
| jareklupinski wrote:
| until then, I will enjoy my yogurt
| jvans wrote:
| In any highly nonlinear system it's extremely difficult to
| predict side effects of changes like this. It's plausible there
| are benefits to things that seem mild or harmless and
| eliminating them can have dramatically negative consequences.
| neves wrote:
| So if I have shingles I'd have less chance to have Alzheimer?
|
| BTW: I had shingles before 50yo and I vaccinated thereafter.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Summary: Wales used a cutoff date in 1933 to set eligibility for
| the vaccine: born before, ineligible; born after, eligible. The
| authors analyzed dementia rates in the populations born one week
| before and one week after and found a significant decrease in the
| vaccination population born one week after.
|
| Given the unlikelihood of any other salient differences in the
| two populations (they were all born within 14 days of each
| other), they conclude that the vaccine had prophylactic effects
| against dementia and further conclude that Alzheimer's may be
| caused by a virus.
| ZooCow wrote:
| The vaccine was the shingles vaccine and it was administered in
| 2013.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Only in women, per the tweets.
| Filligree wrote:
| Women get Alzheimer at a much higher rate, and it's not clear
| why. Perhaps this could be related.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| My question is: What of people who have never had chickenpox in
| the first place, and have never been vaccinated for it? A
| substantial fraction, though still merely a fraction, of the UK
| population is in this category. (Back of napkin calculation, more
| than a million people aged 60+ in the UK.)
|
| If herpes zoster is a causative factor behind Alzheimer's, and if
| the vaccine merely dampens the viral load (or some such thing) in
| people who carry it, then people who have never had it -- and
| have a HZ viral load of zero -- should exhibit a dramatically
| lower rate of Alzheimer's.
| detourdog wrote:
| My family history has no memory of me having chicken pox. I had
| shingles at around 13. I was full vaccinated and still caught
| measles in 2011. The ages when I was receiving vaccinations was
| living in rural Florida.
| prirun wrote:
| I have shingles in my left eye, since 2017. It didn't go away
| because after after a year or 2 of dealing with it, a doctor
| suggested I get my immune system checked. Turns out my immune
| system is for shit (IgG levels got down to 80; they are
| supposed to be 600-1500). They don't know the cause.
|
| If you had shingles at 13, you must have had chicken pox
| before that, because that's how it works: you get CP first,
| it lies dormant in your nerve ganglia, then comes out as
| shingles when you are stressed or your immune system is weak.
|
| Since you said you were vaccinated against measles but still
| caught them, it sounds like you might have an immune system
| issue like me. My body doesn't make antibodies, so I have to
| take weekly infusions of human IgG. IgA and IgM are also not
| working, but those apparently aren't as important. And I
| don't think there is any treatment to supplement them anyway.
|
| Suggest you get an IgG, IgA and IgM blood test. If your
| levels are really low, you could be a walking time bomb like
| me. I was lucky and never got really sick, but while I was at
| Mayo, the levels were so low (80), they sort of freaked out
| and didn't want to let me leave without taking an infusion.
| nick_ wrote:
| Have you been taking valacyclovir?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> My family history has no memory of me having chicken pox.
| I had shingles at around 13
|
| Those are the same virus. Yours manifested as shingles even
| though you were only 13.
| detourdog wrote:
| I have heard it both ways. Shingles at 13 is chicken pox
| and one must have chicken pox to have shingles.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| This has to be one of the worst chain of reasoning I've seen and
| it is depressing to see this come from a Stanford Professor.
|
| In 1978 a sports columnist joked that the Superbowl could predict
| the stock market. It went like this: If one of the 16 original
| National Football League teams -- those in existence before the
| NFL's 1966 merger with the American Football League -- won the
| Super Bowl, the stock market would rise throughout the rest of
| the year. If a former AFL team won, it would go down. This works
| with a 74% success rate till 2021. What does this prove?
| Literally nothing. The fact of the matter is the stock market and
| games are irreducible complex systems with thousands of factors
| contributing to their outcome. With such a system you cannot
| figure anything out empirically because such complexity will
| bring out thousands of correlations over any timeframe.
|
| There are only 2 ways to make any sense of complex systems (human
| bodies is also one of the most complex systems we know). One is
| to have a causal chain of reasoning. For example say identify
| some protein that causes Alzheimers and we also find that
| shingles modifies this protein. Something like this would be the
| gold standard. Now even if this does not work on a person, we can
| be guided to deduce that some other condition is preventing the
| vaccine from working or some other protein is also being damaged
| etc etc.
|
| If we want to be empirical we need a very carefully controlled
| experiment (which might be impossible even if ethical). We need
| two identically healthy humans, some way to induce Alzheimers in
| both of them and then inject one with shingles vaccine and see if
| it works. The fact is the medical establishment does not trust
| our ability to find two identically healthy humans, so we instead
| do this over thousands of people in a hope of extracting a causal
| relationship (a randomized control trial). Notice the one major
| aspect in this trial that the professor does not demonstrate? In
| his trial there is no inducement of Alzheimers or Dementia.
| Without that this whole exercise is meaningless. He seems to
| drastically underestimate the complexity of human life, maybe the
| group before 1933 in his dataset also did not take a host of
| other vaccines which actually stops dementia and not this to name
| a simple example.
|
| Even worse he never tells us the number of humans being examined,
| if its in 100k range maybe there is a small chance that there is
| something here but I suspect this is in 1k range at which point
| this whole study is a joke, you can find thousands of
| correlations in a group as small as 1k humans. Heck even
| randomized control trials require thousands of people and this is
| most definitely a much worse trial than this. In what way does
| this create a "Clean", "Causal", "Without confounders" relation
| is beyond me and to me is a failure of the academic establishment
| that someone can think like this after becoming a professor in
| Stanford. I would be shocked if a graduate student talked like
| this, much less a professor.
|
| Edit: Upon reading the paper this conclusion seems to be based on
| 5% of women in that period which is roughly 5000 women. Needless
| to say there can be thousands of similarities between these 5000
| women that is not explained by the vaccine.
| ed wrote:
| > Even worse he never tells us the number of humans being
| examined
|
| You might want to actually open the paper. N = 282,541.
|
| They have data for 98% of the population of wales. Of the ~3m
| people there, 282,541 were in the relevant age bracket.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I did quickly peruse the paper now. If I'm understanding it
| right the probability of being affected by dementia goes from
| 16% to 12% for the 2 different populations, and it also only
| seems to work for women. For women it decreases from 17% to
| 12% while for men it stays exactly the same. With these
| numbers I rest my case, if this is being taken seriously by
| the academic community I do not know what to say. What if
| more women were diagnosed of dementia before that time period
| (because say women were generally considered hysterical) and
| a definitional change in dementia reduced diagnosis cases?.
| What if hospitals were getting funded for taking more
| psychiatry patients and then that reduced?. What if there was
| a change in a popular birth control supplement? I cannot see
| how this can lead to any clean conclusive hypothesis.
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's only a 75% success rate if you include the superbowls
| prior to the claim being made. Obviously the guy looked at the
| results of the superbowl prior to making his claim.
|
| It drops down to 67% [1] when you look at only after 1978 and
| since 2000 its 10/23 (43%) which really implies its headed
| towards 50% (i.e. uncorrelated). The big difference here is
| that you can get outliers in your data when you have a small
| sample size (i.e. 50) but as the number of football games
| approaches 5000 those outliers go away.
|
| But in support of your point:
| https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_indicator
| CommanderData wrote:
| How about HSV-1/2? Combined this virus is present in about 2/3
| people in the US, and resides dormant near the brain (with cold
| sores).
|
| I thought there's already a strong link with HSV and Dementia, is
| there any more research looking at this virus and a vaccine?
| untilHellbanned wrote:
| Yes Ruth Itzaki has been talking about this for years.
| https://www.beingpatient.com/ruth-itzhaki-alzheimers-viruses...
|
| Potential Rosalind Franklin scenario.
|
| https://www.healthspan.dev is making a mRNA vaccine. Sam Altman
| funded company.
| lifty wrote:
| do you know if this vaccine will work for existing dormant
| infections?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Not going to be surprised if the most common viruses are what
| leads to cancer and mRNA is what becomes a cancer
| preventative as protocols ramp against said viruses.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/
|
| > An estimated 15 percent of all human cancers worldwide may
| be attributed to viruses, representing a significant portion
| of the global cancer burden. Both DNA and RNA viruses have
| been shown to be capable of causing cancer in humans.
| Epstein-Barr virus, human papilloma virus, hepatitis B virus,
| and human herpes virus-8 are the four DNA viruses that are
| capable of causing the development of human cancers. Human T
| lymphotrophic virus type 1 and hepatitis C viruses are the
| two RNA viruses that contribute to human cancers.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25083895/
|
| Kudos to anyone accelerating mRNA in this space.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| But why mRNA specifically instead of a protein or other
| vaccine? What's the advantage?
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Not sure if this is the case for parent, but there was
| such a huge marketing push behind the covid vaccines that
| it's the first thing that jumps to everyone's mind in any
| vaccine related topic.
|
| It's kind of like after everyone being inundated with
| talk about covid for years, there is a tendency to assume
| every health issue is related to it. Some things
| definitely will be, but it turns out the universe of
| things that can go wrong with a human body goes far
| beyond one recent virus.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's not marketing, mRNA technology is truly a shift in
| how rapid vaccine development can occur [1] [2].
|
| [1] https://www.jci.org/articles/view/153721
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8905605/
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| It's not either/or, both things can be true. The mrna
| vaccines have probably had more resources spent on
| promoting them than any product in recent history (ie
| marketing). I would argue that their mindshare is due to
| that and not some innate ability of the public to know
| what will be a successful pharmaceutical technology or
| not.
|
| This is all orthogonal to whether or not the tech
| eventually delivers on all the possibilities.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| mrna vaccines are a lot harder for viruses to mutate away
| from (and easier to adapt if they do) because they let
| you target a gene sequence directly.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The one example of mRNA vaccines that we have has
| resulted in the viruses by and large mutating away from
| them and they haven't been adapted quickly.
| dbsights wrote:
| That doesn't really make sense. Target specifically, and
| it only takes a minor mutation to escape.
|
| A less-specific vaccine would create immunity against
| multiple targets, and would logically require more
| simultaneous mutations to create an escape variant.
|
| Unless your goal is to sell a new vaccine every year
| (chase your own escape variants, immunity-as-a-service),
| then MRNA isn't obviously a win.
| bsder wrote:
| > Target specifically, and it only takes a minor mutation
| to escape.
|
| 1) Not all sections of a virus mutate at the same rate.
| Some sections of a virus are highly conserved or the
| virus simply dies. In Covid-19, for example, the spike
| protein seems to be difficult to change significantly as
| it provides the primary entry for the virus into cells.
|
| 2) mRNA vaccines tell your immune system "target this
| specific sequence" and can avoid problematic sequences.
|
| Normally, you have no idea what section of the virus your
| immune system locked onto. Even worse, if your immune
| system grabs onto something common (EBV pieces causing MS
| or alpha-gal from a tick bite, for example), it can hose
| you bad.
| dbsights wrote:
| Covid-19 is actually a great example. The spike protein
| was highly conserved until it became advantageous for it
| mutate to evade the highly-specific immunity created by
| mRNA vaccines. Then we got Omicron.
| 2fast4you wrote:
| Not an expert, but couldn't the mRNA vaccine target only
| part of the virus genome that's stable across
| mutations/variants? That would give you a broad vaccine
| resistant to mutations
| dbsights wrote:
| Stable across mutations? On what timeframe.. Its been
| stable so far.
|
| However, create a population with narrow immunity based
| on a single protein, and you create a selection pressure
| that incentivizes mutations in that protein. Once a
| successful mutation exists, it has a wide open field to
| spread unchecked. With broad immunity (multiple proteins)
| it is much less likely that a variant can realize the
| multiple simultaneous mutations that would be required to
| spread effectively.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm half-assedly pulling this out of recollection. I
| believe nucleic-acid based vaccines prompt a greater
| response from the part of the adaptive immune system that
| is not the antibody part, while protein-based vaccines
| preferentially boost the antibody response. They do this
| because the antigen is expressed within the cell.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| there's quite a bit of active HSV1/2 work being done although
| it's very early stage. a few vaccines. a cure attempt.
| unfortunately this virus is not seen as a target for funding.
| some of the labs working on these are just sub-teams of larger
| companies working to fight other medical challenges such as HIV
| or cancer. those get the funding and they are able to set side
| some money for HSV research.
|
| probably because it's thought of as a simple skin virus when
| more likely it's a nervous system virus that manifests most
| visibly in the skin
| CommanderData wrote:
| Even if there were a strong link between HSV and Dementia, I
| don't believe our governments would fast track or fund such
| research because their priorities.
|
| It would be nice if Gates or Elon Musk would bring the worlds
| attention to these issues and if something positive comes out
| of it would be a massive net positive to humanity.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| priorities are pretty clear. we spent <$20B on the covid
| vaccine, operation warp speed. ukraine received $75B in the
| last year from the u. s. if it was the same price, we could
| have solved 4 highly infectious diseases in just the last
| year. i'm not trying to get political on that specific war;
| just military in general is where the money goes
| hedora wrote:
| Imagine if, after the first oil crisis, the US had
| earmarked 10% of the military's middle east budget to R&D
| for energy independence.
|
| We would have solved the global warming problem by the
| mid 1990's.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| A sufficient number of nuclear power plants would have
| cost a lot less than that.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You can't (well, couldn't) make steel or concrete from
| electricity from a nuclear power plant. And up until
| recently you couldn't really drive a car from the
| electricity from a nuclear power plant. You can't plow or
| plant a field, or pave a road, or so many other things.
|
| I think if you look at a breakdown in sources of CO2
| emissions, it's less than half. Yes, that's a lot, but
| it's not the whole story.
|
| I'm 100% for getting off fossil fuels. I drive electric.
| But the transition is a hell of a lot more complex than
| "build a lot of nuclear power plants."
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Well, the US spends far more on elder care than on the
| military, so you should say that that is where the money
| goes.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_Unite
| d_S...
| codethief wrote:
| Note that those $20B were not for research but for
| production and rollout. The research costs (for BioNTech)
| were in the order of only $1B or two. Source (in German):
| https://archive.is/L5oFm
|
| Though, obviously, no research lives in a vacuum.
| Companies profit from universities and the larger
| educational system, from other researchers laying the
| groundwork over the years etc.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| And we had multiple covid vaccines within under a year,
| with holdups being studying effects and approvals. While
| I agree we overspend on military, I don't think there's
| evidence spending more money would have improved the
| covid vaccine situation.
| CommanderData wrote:
| Then the opposite would be true? Less money we would have
| got the same outcome. Slightly nonsensical.
|
| We need time and more people looking at the issue =
| money.
| justinator wrote:
| Good reminder to get the shingles vaccine. Never even gotten
| chicken pox!
| Ryder123 wrote:
| This - a thousand times, this.
|
| I spent 5-6 years dealing with something like long-covid (only it
| started before covid). It had symptoms that seemed clearly
| related to an infection, but I also noticed effects that were
| similar to Alzheimer/dementia. Specifically sundowning.
|
| I would become unthinkably exhausted and my mood would change
| drastically between the hours of about 5:00 and 8:00pm. Later in
| the evening, things would magically start clear up and I'd feel
| closer to normal.
|
| That was, by far, the worst period of my reasonably long life,
| and it's still not something I'm over, I can just manage it much
| better. If anyone is dealing with something similar, I'm happy to
| talk about things that have worked for me.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| I have read weird statements by people who had ALS. Some
| patients tell that some of their symptoms are seasonal. I am
| curious what worked for you? Thanks!
| JoshTko wrote:
| Curious as well as to what worked for you. I might have a
| milder version of what you have. Very similar in that it's
| mainly during 5-8pm
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I see the theory is based on the 2 Sept 1933 birth prior and
| after. And after meant they were eligible for the shingles vax.
| But not all born after that date got that vax. So what does the
| data show for born after 2 Sept and vax vs no-vax?
|
| The no-vax born after 2 Sept should be very similar to born
| before 2 Sept, yes? Seems odd they didn't cover that base.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Shingles (Herpes zoster) is implicated. The whole 'lifelong
| nervous system infection' does seem a bit awful. I bet if we chip
| away at new kinds of herpes viruses, we'll find a fairly drastic
| reduction in Alzheimers.
|
| "There is mounting evidence that herpes [simplex] leads to
| Alzheimers", so, HSV1/2 also.
|
| And apparently having APOE4 genome makes it all worse.
| HSV1+APOE4=12x risk.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181022-there-is-mountin...
|
| EDIT: for clarity, the twitter thread showed that the shingles
| vaccine drastically reduces risk
| analog31 wrote:
| Does this mean the chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's?
| How many years til we know?
| kodah wrote:
| Chicken pox doesn't impact HSV1/2 which _a lot_ of people
| have and is also implicated in this analysis. There is,
| however, a doctor working on a cure and vaccine for HSV1 /2
| that will hopefully be available within the decade.
| NickM wrote:
| _a doctor working on a cure and vaccine for HSV1 /2_
|
| Can you share more information on this? Who is this doctor
| you're referring to?
| CommanderData wrote:
| There's a sub reddit I discovered tracking HSV vaccine
| progress (HSV cure research)
|
| Unfortunately the most promising doctor that was working
| on a vaccine was only able to show efficacy of 50% in
| mice. A recent study also showed HSV likely infects more
| than just cells near the brain. Potentially immune cells
| too.
|
| Gsk is working on one. Would be interesting to see the
| results soon. This is a tough nut to crack and clearly
| not enough money being funneled by governments, as
| another person mentioned we have almost 3x the amount we
| spent on covid for a new war.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| No idea about the doctor, but Biontech is starting
| clinical trials [1], and there are a host of other
| vaccine candidates. Some Russians claim they developed a
| cure as well [2].
|
| [1] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-
| release-det...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex_research
| #Vaccin...
| gymbeaux wrote:
| Somewhere on the internet is a website that is keeping
| track of everyone working on HSV-1 and HSV-2 treatments,
| but I'm not able to find it just now. There are several
| entities working on HSV-1 and HSV-2 vaccines.
| chasil wrote:
| Unfortunately, there are several others that can be
| asymptomatic.
|
| "Nine herpesvirus types are known to primarily infect
| humans... More than 90% of adults have been infected with
| at least one of these, and a latent form of the virus
| remains in almost all humans who have been infected."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpesviridae
| tristor wrote:
| The vaccine likely won't eliminate the virus or the existing
| impacts of the virus.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Their idea in mentioning the chickenpox vaccine is that if
| the shingles vaccine is effective against dementia in this
| way, then you'd expect an even greater effect from kids
| generally having gotten the chickenpox vaccine and
| therefore not getting infected with the varicella zoster
| virus in the first place.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| It's very very unlikely that chickenpox vax will eliminate
| Alzheimer's, both in terms of chickenpox vaccine
| effectiveness, as well as there are almost certainly non-VZV
| "causes" for Alzhiemer's.
|
| But yes, it's quite likely that widespread chickenpox vaccine
| will help reduce Alzheimer's rates.
|
| It'd probably be a few more decades before you'd expect the
| cohort that received childhood chickenpox vaccines to reach
| an age where we'd see siginficant rates of Alzheimer's. Even
| then, it would it'd probably be quite difficult to
| disentangle.
| nostrebored wrote:
| It was my understanding that shingles and chickenpox
| vaccination are positively correlated
| brewdad wrote:
| If you mean the vaccine leads to shingles in those who
| receive it, I don't think there is evidence for that. When
| I had shingles in my early 40s, my doctor did mention that
| she is seeing it occur earlier in adults who never received
| the vaccine. The working theory was that we don't come in
| contact with the virus nearly as much as we used to and our
| immune systems can't suppress it as easily when it flares
| up. I don't know if that's actually been studied though.
| xattt wrote:
| MMR-V was first approved in 2005 in the US. Alzheimer's-type
| dementia usually has onset in the mid-60s and 70s.
|
| However, there are other dementias (i.e. vascular) that have
| other etiologies.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Nitpicky, but the chicken pox vaccine came out in 1995 (not
| combined with MMR). So that's 10 fewer years to wait :)
| robocat wrote:
| Introduced in 1995 in US, but usage increased over a
| decade - see first graph: https://xkcd.com/1950/
| xattt wrote:
| Vaccine approvals in years that end in Roman numeral V!?
| That's hardly a coincidence! /s
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 1995 for USA. '84 for Germany and Sweden:
|
| https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/242227/W
| ER8...
| hinkley wrote:
| So we should start seeing early results in the next
| decade?
| yosito wrote:
| This raises a question that probably hasn't been answered yet:
| does the shingles vaccine prevent Alzheimers?
|
| (Edit: sorry, I read the comments before reading the link)
| tim333 wrote:
| "We estimate that over a 7-year follow-up period, getting
| vaccinated averts one in five new dementia diagnoses."
| tempfortwitt90 wrote:
| The anti vax screw will probably wonder if injecting the
| vaccine actually increases your odds of Alzheimers since
| you're getting a partial version of the virus when doing so.
| slashdev wrote:
| The data from this study is pretty definitive that it
| decreases your odds, not increases them.
| tempfortwitt90 wrote:
| [flagged]
| slashdev wrote:
| I could see that. It's irrational, but people are often
| irrational.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I take massive downvotes as a sign of my being right.
|
| I got massively downvoted on reddit in 2014 by putinbots,
| for example. I also regularly get downvoted here when I'm
| right.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| That is both arrogant and 95% of the time wrong.
| Accordingly, I have upvoted you. Take it how you will.
| tempfortwitt90 wrote:
| IMO hes technically right. If you're wrong, people
| correct you. If you're right but they know they can't
| really argue the matter, they downvote.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| People downvote wrong posts plenty on top of corrections,
| or if they just don't want to bother.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I am currently at -2 :)
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Some HN'ers aren't very bright, is all.
| striking wrote:
| It's boring flamebait. I don't disagree with you but I've
| read this comment a hundred times and it doesn't seem
| especially necessary in this conversation compared to any
| other.
| nequo wrote:
| I think you might be getting the down votes because
| antivaxers will always find a way to justify their
| vaccine fears, so it is futile to insert them into the
| discussion when it isn't about them.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| polarizing people into "us versus them" as the intro
| sentence has one aim only; not welcome here.
| lamontcg wrote:
| You're probably getting downvoted by: 1. antivaxxers
| (there's a pile of them here on HN). 2. toxic positivity
| (people who think you are the problem because you're
| being so negative). 3. reading comprehension challenged
| (lots of people just don't parse sarcasm and irony well
| at all). Those three add up to a lot.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| First on the list is probably the folks who are tired of
| reading uninspired political comments about the
| opposition. Whether I agree with the sentiment or not, I
| can recognize that it serves no useful purpose. Nobody
| who reads what I write here is going to change their
| ideology as a result.
| pohl wrote:
| That won't stop 'em. Confidently-asserted lies are more
| compelling, it seems.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| DaniloDias wrote:
| It would be ideal to wait for the people you hate to
| express the ideas you hate before hating them.
| tempfortwitt90 wrote:
| I never stated which one I was.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's worse. Unprompted mocking was the _best_
| interpretation of your post.
| e44858 wrote:
| Seems the chickenpox vaccine actually does indirectly
| increase your chances of getting Alzheimer's:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18999945/
|
| " With childhood varicella vaccination in the United States
| have come concerns that the incidence of herpes zoster may
| increase, because of diminishing natural exposure to
| varicella and consequent reactivation of latent varicella
| zoster virus."
|
| "As the rates of VRHDs and the associated charges have
| decreased, there has been a significant increase in HZHDs
| and associated charges, disproportionately among older
| adults."
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The chickenpox vaccine absolutely decreases the chances
| of the people getting the vaccine of getting dementia.
| This has a side-effect of decreasing the exposure of
| older adults to new chickenpox infections, which
| increases their odds of developing shingles.[1]
|
| But as long as those older adults are getting the shingle
| vaccine, their odds of getting dementia should reduce as
| well.
|
| [1] - Intermittent infection with chickenpox boosts the
| adaptive immune response to the chronic chickenpox
| infection that most people who ever caught the disease
| have. This intermittent boosting helps prevent flareups
| of the chronic chickenpox infection (also known as
| shingles), which is likely the causative factor in
| chickenpox-related dementia. Alternatively, instead of
| getting intermittently infected with chickenpox, they
| could just get a shingles vaccine instead to boost their
| immune response against their previously acquired chronic
| infection.
|
| I presume that this intermittent exposure to chickenpox
| is greatest in adults with children (and grandchildren).
| Possibly explaining the decrease in dementia for older
| people with adult children: https://www.sciencedirect.com
| /science/article/pii/S235282732...
|
| > Having 3+ children, adult daughter(s), or biological
| children was associated with lower risk of cognitive
| impairment.
| tempfortwitt90 wrote:
| Does it lower it compared to not getting the virus nor
| the vaccine?
|
| Seat belts lower car accident deaths. But not lower than
| simply not driving. Isn't this a similar example?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes, not getting viruses at all is preferable to getting
| vaccines. If you figure out how to make that one work let
| me know.
| labster wrote:
| Make 90%+ of your neighbors get vaccinated, then bask in
| your glorious herd immunity.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Never getting the virus is always better. The chickenpox
| vaccine helps prevent chronic viral infection.
|
| Assuming you're asking about whether shingles vaccination
| is comparable to re-exposure.
|
| For the youth a vaccine should absolutely reduce the risk
| better than having a chronic infection to actively fight
| against when it flares up.
|
| For non-chickenpox-vaccinated adults, I have no clue. I
| would expect shingles vaccination would be comparable as
| it effectively does the same thing. But there might be an
| added response from other parts of the adaptive immune
| response against a viral invader.
|
| Regardless, with respect to the chickenpox vaccine, I
| think it's better to take a risk on the current middle-
| aged folks and elderly in favor of basically eliminating
| all of the risk for the young and future generations.
| Since this risk increase would be primarily for middle-
| aged folks and elderly who have children and
| grandchildren (as childless adults are already at
| increased risk from fewer re-exposure routes), I think it
| makes moral sense that they preference the health of
| their descendants over themselves.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > The chickenpox vaccine absolutely decreases the chances
| of the people getting the vaccine of getting dementia.
|
| I'm a bit too certain with this phrasing. This should be
| theoretically the case given that vaccination decreases
| the odds of getting a chronic herpes zoster infection.
| xattt wrote:
| > does the shingles vaccine prevent Alzheimers?
|
| That's what the pre-print addressed.
| epaulson wrote:
| Ben Recht is skeptical:
| https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/1662124696186544128
| drewg123 wrote:
| The most interesting thing that I saw was: " _We find strong
| protective effects of the vaccine for women but none for men, and
| that this diff is driven by Alzheimer's (not vascular) dementia._
| "
|
| I've been meaning to get around to getting the shingles vaccine.
| I was all set to head out the the pharmacy to get it immediately
| until I read that..
| teraflop wrote:
| You have to be careful how you read that. The researchers did
| not _find that the shingles vaccine does not protect men_ (from
| dementia caused by Alzheimer 's). They _failed to find
| statistically significant evidence_ , in their studied
| population, that the vaccine protects men.
|
| As the preceding sentence says, this can be plausibly explained
| by the fact that shingles is more common in women, so whatever
| protective effect the vaccine has is larger and more
| measurable.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The paper found absolutely no effect in men. That is to say:
| No trend nor indication that it might protect men.
|
| Sometimes trends seem suggestive of a real effect, but don't
| rise to statistical significance. That is not the case here.
|
| This is in Figure 4 of the preprint.
| regularfry wrote:
| It could also be that there is a potential effect that this
| study would have been underpowered to detect, _and_ by
| chance no trend was visible in this population. That 's not
| inconsistent, or even particularly unlikely, if I'm
| understanding it right.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| (A) To suggest that the lack of effect in men is a
| statistical anomaly, and that there IS an effect we're
| not seeing.
|
| (B) To suggest that the effect in women is a statistical
| anomaly, and that there's nothing there but a fluke.
|
| These things, from the data, are approximately equally
| likely. Because there was zero effect in men -- in fact,
| men who took the vaccine were apparently more likely to
| be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, though this trend was
| extremely slight.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > These things, from the data, are approximately equally
| likely.
|
| They aren't. The paper states that 95% confidence
| interval for men includes a maximum protective effect of
| up to -1.9 while the 95% confidence for women include a
| minimum effect of -1.3.
|
| Thus it is far more likely that there is a protective
| effect for man than no protective effect for women.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Are you ignoring the fact that it might have a negative
| effect, rather than a protective effect?
|
| The range for men is -1.9 to +2.1 -- which averages out
| to +0.2 -- which indeed makes it seem as though the
| vaccine's trend is to make one slightly more susceptible
| to Alzheimer's, rather than less susceptible, which is
| itself borne out in the figure's trend line. (Fig 4.)
|
| For women it's -5.3 to -1.3.
| shkkmo wrote:
| >Are you ignoring the fact that it might have a negative
| effect, rather than a protective effect?
|
| Nope. We can be 95% confident that there is an effect for
| women but we can't be 95% certain that there is no effect
| for men.
|
| Given that the error ranges overlap, we don't even have a
| high level of certainty that the effect for men doesn't
| equal the effect for women.
|
| > The range for men is -1.9 to +2.1 -- which averages out
| to +0.2
|
| Technically it averages out as +0.1
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > we can't be 95% certain that there is no effect for
| men.
|
| They're at P=0.93 right now. So they're very close.
|
| Whereas, for women, P=0.0013.
|
| Taking everything into consideration, that's exactly what
| I'd call "a high level of certainty that the effect for
| men doesn't equal the effect for women."
| lamontcg wrote:
| That means there's a decent chance that the real effect
| in men is in the range e.g. [-1.9, -1.0] but this study
| was unlucky or underpowered in men to see that effect.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Doesn't this mean that the chance of a true but
| unobserved -1.9 magnitude effect in men is much greater
| than the chance of a true but unobserved +0.0 magnitude
| effect in women?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Sure, but, by the same token, it also means that there's
| a chance of a true but unobserved +2 magnitude effect in
| men.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| this isn't necessarily true. if the study had 1000 women
| and 100 men, it would be a lot more likely that the
| result in men was wrong. similarly, if the effect was 20x
| weaker in men than women, but still existed you would be
| much more likely to see no effect in men even though
| effects existed for both.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Not necessarily true in a theoretical sense, sure.
|
| But there's absolutely no indication that they enrolled
| 10x (or even 2x) more women than men. Nor is there any
| indication of any effect in men, 20x weaker or otherwise.
| (If we're charitable, it's pretty much a flat zero.)
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Total study size was 282,541 people, 128,322 men and
| 154,218 women.
|
| From supplementary material 1, page 27: https://www.medrx
| iv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v...
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Get it anyway, you don't want shingles.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Yeah Shingles is awful.
| phkahler wrote:
| Even a mild case sucks a lot.
| [deleted]
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Also, the study was based on the Zostavax, the live virus
| shingles vaccine. It was discontinued in 2020 (at least in the
| US) in favor of Shingrix which doesn't have live virus. Unclear
| whether Shingrix will have the same effects, though seems
| reasonable to think it might.
| loeg wrote:
| You should get the vaccine. Shingles is awful.
| theonething wrote:
| So you're hesitating to get the shingles vaccine because you
| found out it might not protect you against dementia? Don't you
| want to be protected against shingles?
| syngrog66 wrote:
| The mechanisms of schizophrenia inside the brain also look alot
| like an inflammation or otherwise a kind of an infection immune
| system response, though an over-reaction. I'm making a broad
| characterization, of course.
|
| The parasite toxoplasma gondii was initially noticed to be
| present in lots of folks with this type of mental illness (and
| bipolar) but there hasnt been a 100% correlation.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yet another reason to try to avoid getting infected with
| diseases. A 'stronger' immune system (which is really only
| 'stronger' at defending against the disease that you just
| caught!) isn't worth the risk of long-term side effects from a
| chronic infection.
| DuckFeathers wrote:
| [dead]
| permo-w wrote:
| > which is really only 'stronger' at defending against the
| disease that you just caught!
|
| if this was the case, we wouldn't have the smallpox vaccine, or
| many others. not to mention the massive increase in general
| disease susceptibility when children aren't exposed to these
| agents at a young age
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I don't understand what you are saying, because it appears to
| not follow what I stated. (Edit: Okay, I've got it now.)
|
| A chickenpox infection as a child will indeed help prevent
| against future chickenpox infections (which, for _this
| particular virus_ , are indeed worse when first infected as
| an adult). It may have some slight efficacy against other
| herpesviruses, too, or it could enable a stronger disease
| from a related virus due to antibody-dependent enhancement.
| But more likely a chickenpox infection, and related acquired
| immune responses, will do jack-all with respect to any other
| infectious agent.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Immunity not having challenges, especially early in life, is a
| sure recipe for a miserable life full of allergies (and
| probably more, autoimmune problems are a vast domain).
|
| Not sure I would want to take a small risk of topic discussed
| with almost sure chance of this. Maybe some form of risk is
| unavoidable, and part of life. Of course only till we fully
| crack our dna manipulation without any side effects, but thats
| 22nd century stuff at best.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Environmental, non-disease challenges are important to
| develop proper immune response. Catching the flavor of the
| day does jack all, and might actually prompt some autoimmune
| responses and lymphomas (due to the increased activity of the
| immune system in response to infection).
|
| People who never acquire a chronic herpes zoster infection
| are highly unlikely to benefit from a shingles vaccine with
| respect to this sort of dementia.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Serious deja vu did I not read about this study a year ago on HN?
| I can see this is recent in date but can't shake the feeling...
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35434253/ perhaps this
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| > We found clean, CAUSAL evidence that the shingles vaccine
| prevents a good chunk of dementia cases. So, could a virus cause
| Alzheimer's > YES
|
| Not to be pedantic, but the BCG vaccine is used as treatment for
| bladder cancer but nobody is claiming that Tuberculosis causes
| bladder cancer. In order to claim that shingles is causal (rather
| than that the vaccine affects immune/other function), you would
| have to fulfill Koch's postulates or measure virus levels in
| various patients.
|
| The effect is still interesting.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Could be" is the way we describe possibility in English. There
| may be an enormous amount of evidence that tuberculosis doesn't
| directly or indirectly cause bladder cancer. None of that
| evidence comes from the fact that vaccination against TB is
| effective against bladder cancer. That fact _in isolation_
| could obviously be used as supporting evidence for TB being the
| cause of bladder cancer.
| kps wrote:
| I think they said that. "CAUSAL evidence that the shingles
| _vaccine_ prevents", yes; " _could_ a virus cause Alzheimer's",
| yes. The causal claim is for the vaccine, not the virus.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/975400 is interesting and
| seems to directly contradict what is claimed here.
|
| "Herpes zoster does not appear to increase dementia risk -- on
| the contrary, the viral infection may offer some protection, a
| large population-based study suggests."
| Quarrel wrote:
| The evidence in the parent study is MUCH stronger than the
| evidence in the study you link (and is newer).
|
| Science advances.
| nahnahg wrote:
| [dead]
| loeg wrote:
| It would be great if people under 50 could get this vaccine
| without a prescription (in the US), now many years after it has
| been generally available to boomers.
| treis wrote:
| This seems like a math artifact caused by splitting into two
| groups and then curve fitting the two groups separately. Those
| two curve fits don't line up at the discontinuity but there's no
| reason to expect that they would.
|
| The image in tweet 8 is really the damning one. It shows a big
| gap, but if you fitted the entire set it'd be nearly a straight
| line with a tiny blip caused by the vaccine.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Regression discontinuity
| ghoogl wrote:
| [dead]
| ablyveiled wrote:
| This would not explain the precipitous rise in Alzhemier's rates
| seen in developed countries and mostly in the last few decades. I
| maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
| jjk166 wrote:
| There's a precipitous rise in old people, and especially
| otherwise healthy old people in developed countries. All those
| who would have died of perhaps an upper respiratory disease or
| an untreated infection before they had a chance to develop
| Alzheimer's are no longer being eliminated early. We see
| similar trends for most age related diseases like cancer and
| heart disease. It's only natural that as we get better at
| dealing with diseases we can cure we would see more of the ones
| we can't. That's not to say there couldn't be other
| environmental factors at play, but a rise in Alzheimer's does
| not necessarily mean a rise in whatever causes Alzheimer's.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > All those who would have died of perhaps an upper
| respiratory disease or an untreated infection before they had
| a chance to develop Alzheimer's are no longer being
| eliminated early.
|
| OP claimed a rise in rates, not absolute numbers. Is there
| any plausible reason that reducing other causes of mortality
| might possibly cause a rise in fraction of the elderly
| population that develops Alzheimer's?
| graeme wrote:
| Depends if they meant rates or rates by age. If you mean
| population rates, then rising life expectancy caused by a
| decrease in other causes of death would absolutely
| increased overall pop alzheimer's rates.
|
| If other causes of death were eliminated, you might also
| see an increase in alzheimer's amongst those in the same
| age bracket. This might be clearest with an example.
|
| Suppose we eliminated heart disease. Life expectancy would
| increase. What would happen to the rates of other disease?
| They would go up within age groups. Because you still have
| to die of something. If heart disease can't take someone
| out, that means some other factor will be available. Much
| of the time people have more than one condition.
| jjk166 wrote:
| And this effect produces an increase in rates. Let's say
| that an entire population gets two dice. They roll the
| first one, if it's even they're out, otherwise they roll
| the next one. About 1 in 12 people are going to roll a 6 on
| that second dice. Now let's say for that first dice, you're
| only out if you get a 6. Now the odds of getting a 6 on the
| second dice is about 1 in 7, not because the second dice is
| any more likely to get a 6 but because a greater percentage
| of people who would roll 6's are rolling that second dice.
| The first dice in this analogy are diseases that we can now
| deal with, the second dice are the more intractable
| diseases.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Depends on if the rise is specifically in the fraction of
| the elderly population, or if it's in the fraction of the
| general population.
|
| If the rise is in the fraction of the general population,
| then an increase in the proportion of the general
| population that was elderly would be expected to increase
| the numbers of a disease of the elderly, even if nothing
| was happening.
|
| If there were a rise in the proportion of e.g. 80 year-olds
| that were developing Alzheimer's, that'd be a different
| story. Although you'd still have to ask yourself if some of
| the conditions that were increasing the proportion of the
| population that are 80 year-olds were disproportionately
| extending the life of people with a propensity for
| Alzheimer's.
| cheschire wrote:
| I almost brushed off your message at first, but decided to look
| it up. You have now made me aware of something I had never
| heard of, thanks!
|
| https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-is-alzheimers-called-type...
| riceart wrote:
| It's a bunch of crap. Maybe shouldn't look for medical
| information from a social worker on a clickbait site.
|
| Diabetes (specifically Type 2) is correlated with Alzheimer's
| - how that makes for a useful new classification of diabetes
| is nonsense.
|
| This would be about as sensical as calling nicotine addiction
| Type 2 lung cancer.
|
| It also doesn't help
|
| > However, classifying Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes is
| controversial
|
| No, not in the medical community it isn't. That there are
| some crackpots and quacks out there doesn't change that -
| there is not serious debate ongoing about this in medicine.
|
| It wouldn't be a viable name anyway as the number 3 has
| already been reserved/in common use in actual clinical and
| research practice for pancreatogenic diabetes.
| mjhay wrote:
| It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Metabolic syndrome
| causes all sorts of general havoc with just about everything
| you can think of, which would probably include neuron's ability
| to maintain homeostasis or fight a latent infection.
|
| Most everyone (at least older people who never got a chickenpox
| vax) has a latent varicella zoster (the shingles/chickenpox
| virus) infection, but only a minority will get Alzheimer's. It
| could easily be true that varicella is causal in most
| Alzheimer's, but also that many of those cases would never have
| happened without compounding risk factors like metabolic
| syndrome.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| AFAIK the rise in Alzheimer's was well correlated with the rise
| in life expectancy.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| >> precipitous rise in Alzheimer's rates in developed countries
|
| Besides the older human demographics, it's certainly possible
| the virus strains are evolving to be more aggressive and cause
| problem more often. From a virus perspective, it wants to be as
| viral as possible without killing the host. Alzheimer's seems
| like a reasonable allowance.
| slashdev wrote:
| We've had rises in herpes viruses in developed countries.
| Shingles is a type of herpes virus. So I wouldn't be too quick
| to make that judgment. Also in an aging population, it would
| have to be a relative rise in Alzheimer's, not an absolute one.
| I don't know the data, so I can't say which it is.
|
| But Alzheimer's is a complex disease, it may well be there are
| multiple factors involved. I also am inclined to think there's
| something to your hypothesis, there is some data to support it.
| kakoni wrote:
| > I maintain that alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes.
|
| With type 1 diabetes there is growing evidence that
| coxsackievirus B virus is somehow involved.
| hkt wrote:
| It might explain it if herpes is implicated..
| scythe wrote:
| In short:
|
| - Wales imposed an arbitrary hard cutoff (1933-9-2) on shingles
| vaccine, giving excellent randomization in a natural experiment
|
| - Randomization confirmed by comparison of preexisting conditions
|
| - Individuals born after Sept 2, 1933 show a noticeable
| discontinuity in dementia diagnoses compared to those born prior
| to Sept 2, 1933, as seen in Figure 3
|
| - Analysis indicates a 20% relative risk reduction across several
| types of dementia from receiving the VZ vaccine.
|
| This is not like the EBV-MS connection: nothing in the stats so
| far suggests that varicella zoster is essential or nearly so to
| developing Alzheimer's disease or other dementia, but it is
| strong evidence that it contributes to the development of
| dementia.
| [deleted]
| lliamander wrote:
| For people who have already had chickenpox/shingles, is there any
| potential benefit from getting the vaccine?
| imagainstit wrote:
| Shingles is the latent chickenpox you already were infected
| with reactivating so people who already had chickenpox is
| exactly who the vaccine is for.
|
| You can have shingles multiple times, any time the virus
| reactivates.
| privacyking wrote:
| The vaccine reduces the likelihood of future flare-ups as well
| as their severity.
| scythe wrote:
| Yes. Shingles is effectively chronic.
| tikkun wrote:
| That seems like a big deal!
|
| Related reading on this topic:
| https://www.hardtowrite.com/pathogens/
| mjhay wrote:
| Similarly, there is now extemely strong evidence that the
| Epstein-Barr is causal in multiple sclerosis. The vast majority
| of people are infected with EB, with most never having symptoms.
| However, a nonsignificant minority aren't. A large-scale study of
| data covering 10 million US military service people found that
| those infected with EB were 32 times more likely to develop MS.
| pitaj wrote:
| For anyone else reading, EBV is the virus behind mononucleosis.
| make3 wrote:
| ahhhh I'm in danger.
| hinkley wrote:
| We all are.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| The paper mjhay refers to:
| https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj8222
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Epstein-Barr has long been thought to be a culprit in
| everything from MS to dementia to especially CFS. But that's a
| real problem: there are no antivirals developed that are
| particularly effective against it. EBV research has been a
| backwater in medicine.
| jkingsman wrote:
| > EBV research has been a backwater in medicine
|
| Truth. I moderate a forum for people suffering from
| Mononucleosis and the overwhelming feeling is abandonment and
| fear. Granted there's some inverse survivorship bias --
| people who feel well supported and educated by the medical
| system usually don't post in support groups -- but it's so
| hard seeing so many people suffering for so long (SO LONG --
| years of fatigue and malaise, in many cases) for something
| that has basically no first-line therapy.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Academic disciplines and medical research being famously
| kind to disabled people entering them too, right?
| londons_explore wrote:
| With most of these patients living decades after diagnosis,
| you would imagine that a reasonable chunk of them would
| give the rest of their life to researching a cure for their
| disease.
|
| Yet, while it seems common to do charity awareness
| fundraisers at marathons, it does not seem common for
| people to go learn biochemistry and work on solving the
| problem directly.
|
| Compare that to tech, where a huge chunk of the people here
| have probably written a computer program to solve some itch
| of theirs. Saying "I'm doing a charity fundraiser to fix
| the print preview bug in libreoffice" would be crazy.
|
| I wonder if perhaps these people all have so little useful
| productivity left that it isn't even worth starting to
| learn biochemistry?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Getting access to the resources required for infectious
| disease research without qualifications is difficult.
| lazide wrote:
| Someone suffering a debilitating illness (often later in
| life) is probably only slightly more likely to be able to
| contribute useful research here than someone actually
| already dead.
|
| What with them suffering the debilitating illness and
| all, and being well past the age where it would be
| natural to do a major life change like become a medical
| research.
|
| You might as well be wondering why Ukraine isn't
| encouraging pregnant women to go to the front. I mean,
| what else do they have to do?
| macintux wrote:
| Abandoning one's livelihood to spend years in poverty
| studying advanced science at university in the distant
| hope that in a few decades you might contribute to a cure
| is a little different from taking a few weekends, or even
| a few months of weekends, to scratch a programming itch.
| lumb63 wrote:
| GP does have something right, though. Throwing more money
| at a problem does not always yield a faster or improved
| solution. This is well-known in software, but maybe not
| in other fields.
|
| Money needs to go to educating and recruiting more people
| to the field. It is not as accessible as programming, and
| so is harder, but the same concept applies.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| "Money needs to go to employing more people in the
| field."
|
| Provide the employment (at decent wages) and the people
| will get the training. Provide the education and
| recruitment without the decent employment and you'll have
| a lot of ex-job people in other jobs.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Indeed, the path to a research career -- necessary for
| the grants and facilities you'll need to test your
| hypotheses -- involves such high barriers that you would
| almost need to already be on that path by your freshman
| year in undergrad.
| hgxtlnces wrote:
| [dead]
| echelon wrote:
| I was on the biochem track in undergrad. I was
| particularly interested in disease metabolics and
| cloning.
|
| I switched to tech and entrepreneurship because it
| scratched more itches, provided substantially more money,
| didn't come with the stresses of academia, and could
| conceivably put me on a path to returning to biochem with
| loads of resources and full research independence.
|
| I see biochem companies getting venture funding now, but
| that wasn't always the case. And they're still
| unfavorable relative to tech ventures.
|
| I still don't think the grad school + academia path is
| comfortable enough for those that take it. It's a real
| labor of love, and I admire those that stick with it.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Plenty of alternatives to academia, but then you're
| working on a company's projects. And yeah, the cost of
| equipment, not to mention consumables, is prohibitive.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Also it's absurdly difficult to be an academic with a
| chronic disability, speaking as someone with a chronic
| disability (MS) who was diagnosed in grad school and who
| left the sector because of it.
|
| Moving multiple times, as is usually necessary during the
| post-doc years, means moving away from your support
| system and interrupting your continuity of medical care.
| Your activities of daily living require more time: You
| can't spend 12+ hours a day in a lab if you need to sleep
| for 12 hours a day. You aren't usually paid enough to pay
| for all the little extras that make life easier as a
| disabled person: No delivery services, no supplements, no
| helpful but extra costing medical services like
| massages/PT/etc. And stress usually worsens your
| prognosis: Academia's reliance on competition and
| stressing out post-docs combined with stress being
| associated with relapses was one thing that made me nope
| out. I'm not risking my ability to walk for your
| institution's prestige.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| I have MS and am in grad school. It is very hard.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I was 'lucky' in that I had my first relapse in the last
| semester of my Master's program, so I could limp along
| and finish the degree and decide not to pursue a PhD. An
| academic career was right out, especially as a first-
| generation student.
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| I decided to go to gradschool after the big relapse took
| me down. I'm going to do this in spite of MS. Fuck MS. My
| MS has hit me in both eyes and ruined my old career (I
| was a pilot).
|
| Anyway, I'm going to push myself to build new neurons
| faster than it bashes the old ones. I'm learning Spanish,
| do some programming for school every day, and walk a lot.
| It helps - even if my vision is pretty bad I feel it
| really helps.
|
| I did 2 years of Tysabri and then switched to Lemtrada in
| January. One more dose of that and then theoretically I'm
| done. Going backpacking this summer in Spain as a big
| "fuck you" to MS. I'm slowed down quite a bit but not
| beaten. I will get better or die trying.
|
| It is very hard though, things take longer to do - it's
| like I have ADD now or something? I have constructed some
| compensatory strategies, but yeah... it is hard. Hard to
| explain but it's definitely a real thing and especially
| if I don't get enough sleep.
|
| My old career is over (hard to fly if you can't see
| well), the new one is going to be software engineering/
| AI stuff in spite of this shit.
|
| Whatever you do don't give up. MS is a cruel bitch, but I
| plan on outlasting this asshole. We're not far from a
| real restorative cure.
| sterlind wrote:
| I can't think of many people who've learned to program to
| fix a bug that's bothering them. and learning to program
| in your free time is much easier than switching careers,
| getting a PhD and securing funding for your lab.
|
| nevertheless, I know a number of people with my genetic
| disorder (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) who have become
| researchers, doctors and PTs because of it. but that's a
| genetic disorder, so it hits you early enough in life to
| sway your choice of major.
|
| also, while I get what you're saying about having "little
| useful productivity left," it comes across as a bit
| insensitive.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Principally barrier to entry in the field due to high
| costs, low iteration rate, required space, safety of
| operation, and poor information sharing practices in the
| field.
|
| That's what I would guess. Because otherwise, there's the
| concerned uncle effect: unaffected agent who has close to
| maximal aligned incentive.
| prewett wrote:
| Given the high requirements to enter the field, and a
| likely mismatch of interests between many of the patients
| and the interests required, it would probably be more
| effective to try to fund some researcher directly.
| Identify someone doing high-quality research in an
| adjacent area and offer a direct grant of $50k or
| something to research towards a cure.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Programming is much, much easier to learn to a
| professional level than biochemistry, and open source is
| much, much cheaper and easier to enter and navigate than
| medical academia/pharma industry, and adding a software
| feature is (generally) much easier than discovering or
| developing a drug.
|
| I think it's a valid question but expectations have to be
| tempered by the question of how many people have the
| means to follow through. Not many are in a position to go
| (back) to school for a doctorate just to start working on
| the problem 5-10 years later.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| We don't gatekeep tech. Literally anyone can create a PR
| and submit it to an open repo for consideration.
|
| You can't do the same for biotech. You need a PhD, a
| reputation, a ton of funding, a bunch of papers, to be
| even considered for "this person has a clue about this
| medical issue and might have an answer".
|
| Listening to maintainers talk about their experiences
| dealing with random weird PRs from random weird
| submitters, I'm not sure we're doing it right by not
| gatekeeping it more ;)
| robbiep wrote:
| It's not gatekeeping, it's being able to contribute by
| having foundational knowledge.
|
| Anyone can (and people often do) make big contributions
| in health, but it's hard without deep knowledge.
|
| Not everyone who does software engineering needs a
| computer science degree.
|
| Meanwhile if I head out to the pub on the weekend I hear
| people post cancer diagnosis waxing lyrical about how
| they're beating their breast cancer with
| surgery+chemo/radiotherapy with a diet high in
| antioxidants, ignorant of the fact that one of the ways
| radiotherapy and chemotherapy works is by sctually
| causing oxidative damage, so they're working against it.
| One of the many ways that doing your own research is
| counterproductive
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >there are no antivirals developed that are particularly
| effective against it.
|
| What happened to the research into DRACOs? A few years ago I
| kept hearing about them, but they seemed to vanish.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Antivirals probably won't help as most infections are silent,
| a vaccine is needed. Moderna is working on one.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| EBV reactivation also plays a major role in ME/CFS, a condition
| that can affect people almost as severely as MS, but at any
| age. HHV-6 and 7 infections have also been implicated.
| xattt wrote:
| EB vs non-EB history also seems to imply distinct but similar
| conditions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The evidence implicating EBV in MS is not nearly as strong as
| this causal evidence.
| dtech wrote:
| It's incredibly strong evidence that it's a required but not
| sufficient condition. I've seen professionals have serious
| suspicions that the single EBV-negative MS case from the
| study [1] OP mentioned was a false negative, but apparently
| it's not easy to confirm.
|
| A single EBV-negative MS case. While there were 955 MS cases
| that developed in the 0.5M that were EBV-negative at the
| start of military service. You'd expect there to be about 50.
| That's pretty compelling evidence.
|
| [1] https://www.usmedicine.com/clinical-topics/multiple-
| sclerosi...
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| Can confirm, I have MS and I got EBV about a decade before MS
| took me down.... It's crazy what a tiny little virus can do.
| semidetached wrote:
| At my annual mandatory physical yesterday my doctor told me that
| there's a new shingles vaccine that's around 90% effective as
| opposed to the 60-70% effectiveness of the previous vaccine. It's
| a two-shot vaccine as opposed to the single shot for the old one.
| I turned it down, but will probably ask for it now. I got the
| previous vaccine a few years ago, and then got shingles a few
| months later, although it was a fairly mild case and I assume
| that the vaccination probably had a positive effect on that
| outcome. The funny thing is that I recognized the incident as
| shingles, and called for an appointment immediately and informed
| them of my suspicion. At my appointment two days later the doctor
| prescribed some anti-viral pills and said they were best started
| immediately after recognizing the infection. I started laughing,
| as did he.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Is there any benefit to getting the vaccine after you've
| already gotten shingles?
| Rustwerks wrote:
| You can get shingles again.
| imagainstit wrote:
| Yes, shingles is reactivation of latent herpes zoster
| (chickenpox) usually acquired in childhood. The vaccine
| prevents these reactivations You can have shingles multiple
| times, and some people are more prone to recurrences.
| revelio wrote:
| Clearly it doesn't, given that semidetached just said he
| took the vaccine and then within months got shingles.
| loeg wrote:
| Yes. Risk of Shingles doesn't decrease after an outbreak
| (sadly).
| sib wrote:
| The shingles vaccine that I got 4 years ago was a two-shot
| vaccine. Is this another new(er) vaccine?
| loeg wrote:
| Shingrix is the "new" one but it's been on the market for
| several years.
| hannob wrote:
| Did a quick Google search, and it appears that this isn't a new
| hypothesis, and previous studies had conflicting results.
|
| That seems to be relevant and in direct contradiction:
| https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/no-link-between-shingle...
| While this is only a correlational result, well, while
| correlation does not mean causation, you really can't have
| causation without correlation. So it seems there are conflicting
| results.
|
| Let's see if this new result holds up. FWIW I'll still certainly
| get my shingles vaccine once I'm old enough to fall into the
| recommendation. Shingles is known to be a nasty disease, and
| making it less likely to get is by itself probably more than
| enough reason to get the vaccine.
| kps wrote:
| It's not a direct contradiction because it's about active
| shingles, not the presence or level of the virus. It could be
| that the virus can cause two things independently.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Very interesting. I recently watched the Michael J. Fox
| documentary(Still) and even he commented on an earlier infection
| as a teen "could've" been linked to his condition, but we'll
| never know.
|
| Also having gone through two extended bouts of long covid now, I
| think it reactivated a family history of rheumatoid arthritis in
| me temporarily although I've never formally been diagnosed with
| it or struggled with it.
|
| We're all just walking balls of disease causing germs eh?
| tim333 wrote:
| There's a lot of weird disease stuff going on. There was an
| article on how schizophrenia is linked to some multi million
| year old retrovirus that hangs out in our genome.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Been a while since my reading on the subject, but maternal
| flu infection during pregnancy has been linked to development
| of schizophrenia, too.
| mabbo wrote:
| The thing with Fox is that there were four people on the same
| TV or movie set that all wound up years later ill with
| Parkinson's.
|
| But it's such a rare illness that most people who have it won't
| have ever met someone else with it before they got sick. For
| four people who all worked together to have it, it's a
| statistical anomaly if the disease is purely by chance.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Wow TIL:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Me#Parkinson's_disease
| blastro wrote:
| I recently read some speculation that Alzheimer's might be
| related to prion diseases like wasting and mad cow disease.
| That's one possible explanation for cattle mutilations also,
| which is a really weird rabbit hole to go down.
| briantakita wrote:
| Will be interesting to see the study go through the peer reviewed
| process & whether it will be published by a journal.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I have herpes simplex. Should I get the shingles vaccine?
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