A Simple Vaccination Could Dramatically Reduce the Risk of Dementia
A no-brainer for protecting your brain
Dementia, particularly Alzheimer's, is a terrifying condition that strips individuals of their identity and leaves families caring for strangers. However, a breakthrough suggests that a single, straightforward vaccination could significantly lower the risk of developing this devastating disease. This potential medical advance offers a beacon of hope for preserving cognitive health and maintaining one's sense of self in later life.
Alzheimer's is me unwinding, losing trust in myself, a butt of my own jokes and, on bad days, capable of playing hunt the slipper by myself, and losing.
- gdudeman
If you haven't seen the chart from the UK study, I highly recommend checking it out: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-shingles-vaccine-and-re...
When the vaccine came out in the UK, they included a hard age cutoff: Above a certain age, you weren't eligible. Below that age, you were eligible.
They looked at the probability of a dementia diagnosis over the 7 years after the vaccine was introduced.
People who were born in the "can get the vaccine" group have markedly lower rates of dementia. People in the "too old" group have higher rates. It's cut and dry. The researchers didn't separate out the people who actually got the vaccine.
It's one of those studies where you don't even need to look at the p-value to see the difference between the cohorts.
- robot_jesus
I'm in my 40s with genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's. Been seriously considering the past year or two paying out of pocket for Shingrix. I think it would be ~$500 total for two doses.
Sure, I could wait 7 or 8 years until I qualify via insurance, but is that really worth the risk for what is an easily absorbed cost to me? Especially when I have a friend in her late 30s who just went through a very rough bout of shingles?
It makes sense to have targets like age 50 for population-wide public health recommendations. But it can and does infect people of much earlier ages.
Recent articles like this make me think I'll go ahead.
- modeless
Unfortunately this is a spurious finding. See this presentation: https://youtu.be/qlTnnQytOJ0
The mechanism is that people with the shingles vaccine are less likely to visit the hospital (because they don't get shingles). Because they have fewer hospital visits they are less likely to receive an incidental diagnosis of dementia from a hospital.
- pstuart
I got shingles in my early 50s and did not know there were antivirals that could help mitigate its effects. I now have postherpetic neuralgia and the pain is not quite enough to off myself but the fact that I have to live with this for the rest of my life weighs me down.
It turns out that "pain management" is more art than science and almost all the pharma options out there come with significant risks and concerns. I ended up turning to kratom to manage the pain, which it does, but it's come at significant cost as well (addiction being one of them). I'm now going to try peptides (ARA-290 and BPC-157) to see if maybe that can help but it's all a crap shoot.
I share this as a warning/advice: get the vaccine if you can, even if insurance resists, push back. It may be worth it out of pocket IMHO. If you can't, remember to get access to antivirals immediately if you can.
- hereme888
Replicated association, which is strong, but not proof. Initial study saw a 3.5% absolute reduction in dementia diagnoses over seven years with a very wide confidence interval. In Australia the study was replicated with 1.8% absolute reduction over 7.4 yrs. Canadian replication: 2% over 5.5 yrs.
Infections generally increase the risk of future dementia. Like the more colds you have throughout life.
- cubefox
> Most of the evidence of its anti-dementia effect relates to an earlier version of the vaccine, which used a weakened form of the live virus. It has since been largely replaced by a new one, Shingrix, which contains just a sprinkling of proteins from the virus and is seen as safer because it cannot cause an infection.
Unfortunately the apparent anti-dementia effect of this old vaccine (Zostavax) recently turned out to be a statistical illusion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qlTnnQytOJ0
It is not clear whether the effect from Shingrix (the new one) is real or not. We currently don't have a case-control study which could prove causation.
- khriss
Recently, even the TDAP (Tetanus) vaccine was correlated with lower incidence of dementia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26919881
I recall seeing a few discussions on HN comments hypothesizing that immune system stimulation via the vaccine might be the root cause. Now that the Amyloid hypothesis is on the wane, hopefully we'll explore other paths.
- tsoukase
Dementia might have dozens of risk factors, each adding up a little. Physical and emotional stress, insomnia, head microinjuries, arteriovascular risk factors, infections and there lies herpes zoster. Only the latter has a causal treatment and is only single stone on the wall of disease.