Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses With Alzheimer’s Again And Again

[Pelican Press 0]

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Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses With Alzheimer’s Again And Again

Amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s ********

A study of around 500,000 medical records suggested that severe viral infections like encephalitis and

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increase the risk of neurodegenerative ********* like

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and

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.

Researchers found 22 connections between viral infections and neurodegenerative conditions in the study of around 450,000 people.

People treated for a type of inflammation of the brain called viral encephalitis were 31 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s ********. (For every 406 viral encephalitis cases, 24 went on to develop Alzheimer’s ******** – around 6 percent.)

Those who were hospitalized with pneumonia after catching the

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seemed to be more susceptible to Alzheimer’s ********, dementia, Parkinson’s ********, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Intestinal infections and meningitis (both often caused by a

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), as well as the varicella-zoster virus, which causes shingles, were also implicated in the development of several neurodegenerative *********.

The impact of viral infections on the brain persisted for up to 15 years in some cases. And there were no instances where exposure to

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was protective.

Around 80 percent of the viruses implicated in brain ********* were considered ‘neurotrophic’, which means they could cross the blood-brain barrier.

“Strikingly, vaccines are currently available for some of these viruses, including

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, shingles (

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), and pneumonia,” the researchers

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in their paper published last year.

“Although vaccines do not prevent all cases of illness, they are known to dramatically reduce hospitalization rates. This evidence suggests that vaccination may mitigate some risk of developing neurodegenerative ********.”

In 2022, a study of more than 10 million people

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.

“After reading [this] study, we realized that for years scientists had been searching – one-by-one – for links between an individual neurodegenerative disorder and a specific virus,”

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senior author Michael Nalls, a neurogeneticist at the National Institute on Aging in the US.

“That’s when we decided to try a different, more data science-based approach,” he

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. “By using medical records, we were able to systematically search for all possible links in one shot.”

First, the researchers analyzed the medical records of around 35,000 Finns with six different types of neurodegenerative ********* and compared this against a group of 310,000 controls who did not have a brain ********.

This analysis yielded 45 links between viral exposure and neurodegenerative *********, and this was narrowed down to 22 links in a subsequent analysis of 100,000 medical records from the *** Biobank.

While this retrospective observational study cannot demonstrate a causal link, it adds to the

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hinting at the role of viruses in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s ********.

“Neurodegenerative disorders are a collection of ********* for which there are very few effective treatments and many risk factors,”

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co-author Andrew Singleton, a neurogeneticist and Alzheimer’s researcher and the director of the Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias.

“Our results support the idea that viral infections and related inflammation in the nervous system may be common – and possibly avoidable – risk factors for these types of disorders.”

This study was published in

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.

An earlier version of this article was published in January 2023.

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#Study #Medical #Records #Links #Viruses #Alzheimers

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