Just FYI, as kind of an off topic factoid, the vaccine strains of chickenpox go into latency and can re-emerge as shingles, too. The vaccine isn't just one type of attenuated virus, but rather it contains a spectrum of degrees of attenuated viruses, and the least attenuated ones are the ones that make it into the dorsal root ganglia. When you're injected with the vax, there's a rapid process of natural selection that transpires, where the most attenuated viruses are killed quickly, but some in there are almost identical to the wild virus, and you're stuck with them forever, just like with "wild" varicella, although there will be a lot less/fewer of them than if you'd caught nothing but the wild virus instead. So, assuming the theory that varicella is in fact a cause of dementia/Alzheimer's is true, vaccination should still decrease it.
I also have a question you might have an answer to: If these herpes family viruses are a significant cause of dementia and/or Alzheimer's, why hasn't that been demonstrated long ago by doing PCR on the brains of deceased people who died from those diseases? Is it a case of contamination being so commonly behind positive PCR results that it HAS been found, but that can't be ruled out as just from contamination? (I know the neurotropic effects of SARS2 is in dispute for that reason, as well as SV40's relationship with various cancers.)
I didn’t even want to touch the risk of shingles after chickenpox vaccine as a child (and no wild-type infection) as, the best I can tell, no one really has any idea how rare this is! I suppose we will start to figure this out in a couple more decades. If it’s 10% instead of <<<1% that would be most unfortunate.
Without digging back into Dr Itzhaki’s research, I recall that when they looked for HSV1 (granted not Zoster) in people’s brains with and w/o Alzheimer’s they found high rates of HSV1 carriage in both controls and dementia patients. She ascribed it, I believe, to “symptomatic” cases of HSV driving the inflammation that would lead to dementia, and linked carriage of APO E with higher rates of symptomatic infection and dementia. But in a nutshell, autopsies did not show direct support for her theory.
It is an interesting article thank you for posting.
Buzz Hollander mentions the preferred vaccine Shingrix in closing paragraphs and authors mention Shingrix in line 118. I had the zostavax vaccine but did come down with shingles in 2021. Lines 448-450 note that the results "apply only" to this earlier vaccine which likely no one takes anymore. The title of the post "will a shingles vacccine prevent alzheimers" is kind of click-bait but the review was thorough. Thank you again...
The big question is whether a sketchy study finding off-target benefit to a crappy vaccine implies we should expect a lot out of an effective vaccine for the same virus… or whether we should ignore the whole thing since it was a sketchy study. I favor the latter but the other viewpoint is fair, too.
A preliminary study of dietary aluminium intake and risk of Alzheimer's disease
M A Rogers 1, D G Simon
Affiliations expand
PMID: 10350420 DOI: 10.1093/ageing/28.2.205
Abstract
Background: epidemiological studies of Alzheimer's disease and aluminium intake have focused on aluminium in drinking water. There have been no studies investigating the relation between the disease and the consumption of foods containing large amounts of aluminium additives.
Objectives: to conduct a pilot study to determine whether dietary intake of aluminium additives differs in individuals with and without Alzheimer's disease.
Design: matched case-control study. Controls were matched to cases on age, gender and date of admission to the centre.
Methods: residents of the Loretto Geriatric Center with and without newly-diagnosed Alzheimer's disease were selected. Next-of-kin were asked to complete information on the resident's medical history, lifestyle behavior and dietary intake before admission to the center. An expanded form of the Health Habits and History Questionnaire was used to determine dietary intake. Consumption of foods containing elevated levels of aluminum additives was compared between cases and controls.
Results: the crude odds ratio for daily intake of foods containing high levels of aluminium was 2.0 and, when adjusted for covariates, was 8.6 (P=0.19). Intake of pancakes, waffles, biscuits, muffins, cornbread and/or corn tortillas differed significantly (P=0.025) between cases and controls. Adjusted odds ratios were also elevated for grain product desserts, American cheese, chocolate pudding or beverages, salt and chewing gum. However, the odds ratio was not elevated for tea consumption.
Conclusion: past consumption of foods containing large amounts of aluminium additives differed between people with Alzheimer's disease and controls, suggesting that dietary intake of aluminium may affect the risk of developing this disease. Larger studies are warranted to corroborate or refute these preliminary findings.
Avoid aluminum-containing food additives. An epidemiological study found that daily intake of foods containing high levels of aluminum leavening agents (pancakes, waffles, biscuits, muffins, cornbread, corn tortillas) was 8.6 times higher in Alzheimer’s victims than in controls.
Oh, my — talk about confounding risks when the major risk factors are pancakes and waffles :)
Trying to sort out dietary (and other) exposures as causative of Alzheimer’s Disease is a tricky, tricky business — which is unfortunate, as I suspect there are some legitimate causal relationships out there.
This means a lot more for the future study of Alzheimer's than it means practically for patients. Buzz correctly calls a 20% lowereing of shingles cases from this vaccine a disappointing outcome, but then an only 6% improvement shown on Alzheimer's must in reality be more interesting than impactful. Rates, despite being clear statistical differences, only go from 16% incidence of dementia down to 15%. This gives clues to basic research about what to study further, though!
I am curious how many times and with which shingles vaccine the seriously ill from shingles and possibly demented senator from California was vaccinated? It seems the media is not interested in reporting on this because, #1-it might reflect negatively on either the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing shingles, or #2-the hypocrisy of the do as I say, not as I do democrats if she has not received the vaccine.
In the first figure, I would want to see the slope of the line obtained under the assumption of no discontinuity added to the figure. Notice there is more serial correlation in the residuals for the part of the line for those under 80. I think this is because the discontinuity is tilting the line segments so that it explains all the variation at the point of the discontinuity, id est it is explaining the random variation in the data at that point as well as the effect of the intervention (if any exists). In the authors’ favor is the fact that they don’t have to estimate the point where the presumed discontinuity is. (Did they have to bootstrap to get their confidence intervals?)
The study sounds well designed but I think its fair to be skeptical of any study which encourages people to get a vaccine which the industry has been pushing hard for years. It's a little too convenient that the vaccine reduces your risk of dementia, but the actual disease doesn't?
Has Alzeheimer's disease become much more common in the elderly? ( it seems so). Wouldn't it be worth putting major major NIH funding into research that tries to find out why ?
Instead hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on trying to find a patentable "treatment" or, better yet, a vaccine. Vaccines are highly profitable because they are given to everyone, not only the sick. For this reason vaccines should be held to a very high level of safety and risk/benefit.
Alzheimer's disease is going to be more common because people are living longer, for one thing. Lots and lots of funding has gone into trying to find out what causes it. Dr Buzz mentioned some of the other research done in his post, but even that doesn't hardly scrape the surface. But LOTS of work has been done. It just hasn't turned anything terribly solid up yet.
Thanks for the breakdown!
Just FYI, as kind of an off topic factoid, the vaccine strains of chickenpox go into latency and can re-emerge as shingles, too. The vaccine isn't just one type of attenuated virus, but rather it contains a spectrum of degrees of attenuated viruses, and the least attenuated ones are the ones that make it into the dorsal root ganglia. When you're injected with the vax, there's a rapid process of natural selection that transpires, where the most attenuated viruses are killed quickly, but some in there are almost identical to the wild virus, and you're stuck with them forever, just like with "wild" varicella, although there will be a lot less/fewer of them than if you'd caught nothing but the wild virus instead. So, assuming the theory that varicella is in fact a cause of dementia/Alzheimer's is true, vaccination should still decrease it.
I also have a question you might have an answer to: If these herpes family viruses are a significant cause of dementia and/or Alzheimer's, why hasn't that been demonstrated long ago by doing PCR on the brains of deceased people who died from those diseases? Is it a case of contamination being so commonly behind positive PCR results that it HAS been found, but that can't be ruled out as just from contamination? (I know the neurotropic effects of SARS2 is in dispute for that reason, as well as SV40's relationship with various cancers.)
I didn’t even want to touch the risk of shingles after chickenpox vaccine as a child (and no wild-type infection) as, the best I can tell, no one really has any idea how rare this is! I suppose we will start to figure this out in a couple more decades. If it’s 10% instead of <<<1% that would be most unfortunate.
Without digging back into Dr Itzhaki’s research, I recall that when they looked for HSV1 (granted not Zoster) in people’s brains with and w/o Alzheimer’s they found high rates of HSV1 carriage in both controls and dementia patients. She ascribed it, I believe, to “symptomatic” cases of HSV driving the inflammation that would lead to dementia, and linked carriage of APO E with higher rates of symptomatic infection and dementia. But in a nutshell, autopsies did not show direct support for her theory.
It is an interesting article thank you for posting.
Buzz Hollander mentions the preferred vaccine Shingrix in closing paragraphs and authors mention Shingrix in line 118. I had the zostavax vaccine but did come down with shingles in 2021. Lines 448-450 note that the results "apply only" to this earlier vaccine which likely no one takes anymore. The title of the post "will a shingles vacccine prevent alzheimers" is kind of click-bait but the review was thorough. Thank you again...
The big question is whether a sketchy study finding off-target benefit to a crappy vaccine implies we should expect a lot out of an effective vaccine for the same virus… or whether we should ignore the whole thing since it was a sketchy study. I favor the latter but the other viewpoint is fair, too.
A preliminary study of dietary aluminium intake and risk of Alzheimer's disease
M A Rogers 1, D G Simon
Affiliations expand
PMID: 10350420 DOI: 10.1093/ageing/28.2.205
Abstract
Background: epidemiological studies of Alzheimer's disease and aluminium intake have focused on aluminium in drinking water. There have been no studies investigating the relation between the disease and the consumption of foods containing large amounts of aluminium additives.
Objectives: to conduct a pilot study to determine whether dietary intake of aluminium additives differs in individuals with and without Alzheimer's disease.
Design: matched case-control study. Controls were matched to cases on age, gender and date of admission to the centre.
Setting: Syracuse, New York, USA.
Subjects: 46 participants comprising 23 matched sets.
Methods: residents of the Loretto Geriatric Center with and without newly-diagnosed Alzheimer's disease were selected. Next-of-kin were asked to complete information on the resident's medical history, lifestyle behavior and dietary intake before admission to the center. An expanded form of the Health Habits and History Questionnaire was used to determine dietary intake. Consumption of foods containing elevated levels of aluminum additives was compared between cases and controls.
Results: the crude odds ratio for daily intake of foods containing high levels of aluminium was 2.0 and, when adjusted for covariates, was 8.6 (P=0.19). Intake of pancakes, waffles, biscuits, muffins, cornbread and/or corn tortillas differed significantly (P=0.025) between cases and controls. Adjusted odds ratios were also elevated for grain product desserts, American cheese, chocolate pudding or beverages, salt and chewing gum. However, the odds ratio was not elevated for tea consumption.
Conclusion: past consumption of foods containing large amounts of aluminium additives differed between people with Alzheimer's disease and controls, suggesting that dietary intake of aluminium may affect the risk of developing this disease. Larger studies are warranted to corroborate or refute these preliminary findings.
Avoid aluminum-containing food additives. An epidemiological study found that daily intake of foods containing high levels of aluminum leavening agents (pancakes, waffles, biscuits, muffins, cornbread, corn tortillas) was 8.6 times higher in Alzheimer’s victims than in controls.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10350420/
Oh, my — talk about confounding risks when the major risk factors are pancakes and waffles :)
Trying to sort out dietary (and other) exposures as causative of Alzheimer’s Disease is a tricky, tricky business — which is unfortunate, as I suspect there are some legitimate causal relationships out there.
Numerous studies have also found that there is a high incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in areas with a high level of aluminum in the drinking water.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2562879/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11470314/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1795153/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19064650/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8614502/
Colin Meyer, DVM, PhD
This means a lot more for the future study of Alzheimer's than it means practically for patients. Buzz correctly calls a 20% lowereing of shingles cases from this vaccine a disappointing outcome, but then an only 6% improvement shown on Alzheimer's must in reality be more interesting than impactful. Rates, despite being clear statistical differences, only go from 16% incidence of dementia down to 15%. This gives clues to basic research about what to study further, though!
I am curious how many times and with which shingles vaccine the seriously ill from shingles and possibly demented senator from California was vaccinated? It seems the media is not interested in reporting on this because, #1-it might reflect negatively on either the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing shingles, or #2-the hypocrisy of the do as I say, not as I do democrats if she has not received the vaccine.
She got Sinovax
Isn't that a Chinese manufactured covid vaccine? I was curious if/which shingles vaccine she received. Thanks.
My comment was a joke premised on Feinstein's history of employing Chinese spies. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/details-chinese-spy-dianne-feinstein-san-francisco/
In the first figure, I would want to see the slope of the line obtained under the assumption of no discontinuity added to the figure. Notice there is more serial correlation in the residuals for the part of the line for those under 80. I think this is because the discontinuity is tilting the line segments so that it explains all the variation at the point of the discontinuity, id est it is explaining the random variation in the data at that point as well as the effect of the intervention (if any exists). In the authors’ favor is the fact that they don’t have to estimate the point where the presumed discontinuity is. (Did they have to bootstrap to get their confidence intervals?)
The study sounds well designed but I think its fair to be skeptical of any study which encourages people to get a vaccine which the industry has been pushing hard for years. It's a little too convenient that the vaccine reduces your risk of dementia, but the actual disease doesn't?
Has Alzeheimer's disease become much more common in the elderly? ( it seems so). Wouldn't it be worth putting major major NIH funding into research that tries to find out why ?
Instead hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on trying to find a patentable "treatment" or, better yet, a vaccine. Vaccines are highly profitable because they are given to everyone, not only the sick. For this reason vaccines should be held to a very high level of safety and risk/benefit.
Alzheimer's disease is going to be more common because people are living longer, for one thing. Lots and lots of funding has gone into trying to find out what causes it. Dr Buzz mentioned some of the other research done in his post, but even that doesn't hardly scrape the surface. But LOTS of work has been done. It just hasn't turned anything terribly solid up yet.
Lots of this research has been misdirected groupthink, and that group has controlled the purse strings.
https://www.thefp.com/p/where-is-the-cure-for-alzheimers
Yes. That's the case with a lot of diseases, but it has been particularly bad with this one.