If you have any of the herpes infections, get it treated!!!
What amyloid beta normally does in the brain isn’t clear. Robert Moir, a neurologist at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, says that many researchers have cast it as a villainous molecule with no beneficial function. “It’s just bad, bad, bad,” he says. “But it has become increasingly obvious that this isn’t true.” Moir thinks that amyloid beta has a more heroic role, as a foot soldier of our immune system. It protects neurons from infectious microbes—and from herpes viruses, in particular.
Amyloid beta protects against these viruses by latching onto them in large numbers, imprisoning them in self-assembling cages. That’s typically a good thing, but Moir argues that if the process goes on for too long, it builds up to the problematic plaques of Alzheimer’s. According to him, amyloid beta is still at the heart of the Alzheimer’s story, but it isn’t the villain. “In our model, Alzheimer’s is caused by amyloid beta’s reaction to something else, and most likely some kind of infection” like herpes, he says.
Hints that they can already exist. One study published earlier this year tracked the health of about 78,000 Taiwanese people, half of whom had been diagnosed with shingles within a 16-year period. Shingles is caused by a herpes virus called VZV, which also causes chicken pox in children. Among adults, the study found that people with a recent shingles flare-up had an 11 percent higher risk of developing dementia than healthier peers. And strikingly, those who were treated with anti-herpes drugs had a 45 percent lower risk of developing dementia than their untreated peers.
A second Taiwanese study looked at more than 8,000 people who had been recently diagnosed with HSV–1. Over the next decade, those people were 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia than uninfected peers. But again, that risk fell by 80 percent among those who had been treated with anti-herpes drugs. “That’s perhaps the strongest epidemiological data to emerge so far,” Moir says.