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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean the chickenpox vax will eliminate Alzheimer's? How many years til we know?

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

Nitpicky, but the chicken pox vaccine came out in 1995 (not combined with MMR). So that’s 10 fewer years to wait :)

Vaccine approvals in years that end in Roman numeral V‽ That’s hardly a coincidence! /s

1995 for USA. ‘84 for Germany and Sweden:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/242227/WER8...

So we should start seeing early results in the next decade?

Introduced in 1995 in US, but usage increased over a decade - see first graph: https://xkcd.com/1950/

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.

The vaccine likely won't eliminate the virus or the existing impacts of the virus.

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.

I think that Alzheimer's likely has many causes.

This research indicates that the chickenpox/shingles virus may be related to about 20% of dementia cases - so not all Alzheimer's but an appreciable amount.

It could be that other cases are caused by other Herpes viruses, or maybe Epstein Barr - vaccines for those may reduce it even more

It was my understanding that shingles and chickenpox vaccination are positively correlated

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.

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