back
74 comments
There's a lot more to the relationship between pathogens and neurological conditions. This article has some good information: https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/ (Please ignore the clickbaity tone, there's actually good stuff here).

We know there are a ton of correlations. We don't have causal links, although there is quite a bit of speculation about inflammation.

Not related to a pathogen, but there have been studies in seeing if untackled celiac disease causes dementia through inflammation: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/sheffield-coeliac-diseas...

I have a personal interest in this as my dad had celiac disease, refused to obey the diet, then within a few years had vascular dementia, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and three strokes! Inflammation -> brain problems feels like a natural connection to me whether through pathogen or immune reaction.

I've had issues with inflammation for most of my life and this line of thinking has always worried me. I just had to do a full blood panel last week for a new doctor in my quest to understand the inflammation throughout my body. I have been feeling less and less mentally acute lately and I wonder if the inflammation is finally having a neurological effect.
Related: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and not developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinations against diseases that people normally do not get. This hints at a reason other than simply „avoided disease“.

Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781

I wrote a summary in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161

Vaccination may trigger some cascade that has effects beyond the intended immune response... activating processes which in some way clean the brain or filter blood more thoroughly before it passes through the BBB.

The integrated nature of the immune system whatever immediate response vaccination triggers probably

I once had a shoulder / joint problem that had lingered for a couple of weeks. Normal sort of thing that comes up from time to time in training. But I was going out of country and had to get a bunch of vaccines. They loaded me up with like 5 or 6 shots at the visit. Weirdly, after getting a couple of shots in the arm, I noticed that the next day my shoulder issue was totally gone. Could be coincidence, but at the time I got the impression that the extra temporary inflammation gave my body enough of a push to just go in there and fix it.
Makes me wonder if the pain signal was there because the previous repair process failed to fix it and then a new repair stimulant (inflammation) was needed to trigger that fix.
That's what I was thinking. While not recommended, I've heard of people fixing their months-long tendonitis by first acutely pissing it off enough to be unbearable and then all of a sudden it heals.
Could also been the effect of sticking a needle in the area. Acupuncture is a popular treatment for chronic pain.
Sounds a bit like acupuncture? I mean, if you ignore the whole "chi energy" angle. Or whatever woo is meant to be awoken by the needles.

I also had a shoulder problem for well over a year. I think it was a pinched nerve. Went to countless physios, tried pills, stretching, weight training and even acupuncture. Nothing. Not a bit of relief, and some times even more pain.

Then I went on a two week holiday to Sri Lanka. Swam in 30C degree water. Laid on the hot sand. And basically did nothing for the entire two weeks. It wasn't until the plain ride home that I realised I was no longer in pain! I've been pain free ever since.

Sorry.. just realised my little story had nothing to do with vaccines or inflammation.

Acupuncture is pseudoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...

I think a better contribution to the discussion would be more details or a better source.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-science-acupuncture

They found a mapping of neurons that match with how acupuncture determines location, intensity, depth of the needle. Leading to specific neurological firing enabling reduction in inflammation.

Many in our society look at the ancients as stupid because they worshipped gods or spirits. Constantly we’re finding what they discovered and said has evidence according to our “god” of science.

I think throwing away their wisdom is a mistake, we should look at many of their practices like the pyramids, trying to find what they may have seen that we do not. Not throwing it to the wayside because it’s “woo-woo”

I guess the 'data' here is that someone having vaccines just before the same holiday might then attribute the same relief to the injection immune response rather than hot treatment and relaxation.

Hence causation never necessarily equalling causation...

*correlation
There's enough unfounded scares around vaccination as it is. Please do better than write about "activating processes which in some way clean the brain". This is medical version of technobabble.
It sounds like babbling to say 'we teach our immune system to fight diseases by showing them weaker versions'. The immune system is complicated and unless you're talking about things directly in terms of chemistry and protein binding or whatever, you're not talking about it accurately.

Personally, it makes a lot of sense to me that the immune system is responsible for much more than viruses or bacteria. The need for a class of diseases related to an unhealthy one (autoimmune diseases) is proof IMO

> 'we teach our immune system to fight diseases by showing them weaker versions'

This is a simplification of a well researched process which we understand and can read about. What the previous poster wrote was just speculation as far as I can tell, unless someone wants to post some reference about cleaning the brain and blood?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spleen

"The spleen plays very important roles in regard to red blood cells (erythrocytes) and the immune system. It removes old red blood cells and holds a reserve of blood, which can be valuable in case of hemorrhagic shock, and also recycles iron."

They're speculating, but neither you nor I know if that hypothesis is correct.

Side effects and downstream effects are common across almost all drugs.

It's not absurd or unfounded to hypothesize an explanation for the correlation researchers observed. It could be the case, it could be something else or it could be the case that the correlation means nothing.

I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic.

Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.

> I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic.

Does this defy logic? At the worst, I'd say I lack an intuition around it, rather than that it's unintuitive.

Yeah, the knee-jerk response should not be "the correlation is spurious", rather it should be "the causation is different from what the authors would like it to be". (That is, whatever hypothesis they came up with, we should assume it's wrong and tell the authors to go pound sand unless they provide strong evidence otherwise.)

In this case, as others are saying, the explanation that comes to my mind is: "What kind of person gets vaccinated against rare diseases that people don't normally get? Probably one who cares extra about health and has resources to spend on it, and has a proactive and vigilant doctor." Selection bias should always be considered in correlational studies.

We know that an Epstein-Barr-Virus infection is a necessary condition to get MS so it doesn't defy logic that other viruses cause other cell diseases and that vaccines can prevent that
People who seek vaccination may have a higher than average interest in their own health. This may cause them to live longer.
People who get vaccinated are also necessarily not people who are excluded from vaccination for medical reasons (e.g. people with weakened immune systems can't get live virus vaccines).
Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? My whole life until Covid I knew of one person whose parents hadn’t got him routinely vaccinated, everyone in my circle found that very strange and as soon as he was able he did it himself.

I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%

> Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground?

It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies.

There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best.

This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)

Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam.

Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.

Not necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time.

Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.

Before COVID, the largest, and growing, anti-vax base were those who thought vaccines caused autism in children. Post-COVID total vaccine "skepticism" became a shibboleth for an order of magnitude more people.

I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths.

To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.

Yes same in Canada, but unfortunately politicians here decided to make the issue of vaccinations political so now it’s a divisive topic with more of my friends now questioning even routine vaccinations (whereas before there were none who would)
I agree, I think the politicization of the covid-vaccine, and almost forced vaccination in many countries and places of e.g. people younger that 20-30 years who would stand to get no benefit from the vaccine whatsoever has created an anti-vax sentiment that will now stay with us for quite a while.

Hopefully this skepticism won't spread to the many vaccines for diseases that are much more dangerous than Covid-19.

Having crossed paths with my fair share of anti-vaxxers over the years there's now an element of spite when I ask for the shots.
That seems unhealthy. You should just look out for your own health and not worry about the others
What is this “may” - syphilis has been known to do this fairly directly for a long time, long before Tuskegee or anything like that.

it shouldn’t be surprising that more viruses do this (the reality seems more to be that traditionally viruses that cross the blood brain barrier, like most things, result in rapid death so no real time for people to show symptoms we’d call neurodegenerwtion)

Syphilis is a bacterial infection that grows, among other places, in your brain. Pneumonia viruses live inside your airways, and if anything happens in your brain it's because of the immune system doing something bad. They are very different things. In particular,

>Finally, it is known that about 80% of the viruses observed in this study can invade the nervous system and trigger the immune system’s inflammatory response.

So this fits in to the bigger picture that inflammation in your CNS from any source will do lasting damage.

Many who have had chicken pox still have the virus living dormant in their neurons. The virus can randomly reactivate and causes a painful skin lesions called shingles.
Yes, but "living in neurons" != "living in the brain" != "causes neurodegenerative disease", which seems to be the implication being drawn here.
Herpesviruses (which includes VZV, the chickenpox virus) sometimes cause recurring meningitis and encephalitis. They do get into the brain. We just don’t know how.
> Herpesviruses (which includes VZV, the chickenpox virus) sometimes cause recurring meningitis and encephalitis. They do get into the brain. We just don’t know how.

So does MMR (Paramyxoviridae, Matonaviridae) and Influenza. So does Zika and Dengue and Yellow Fever (Flaviviridae) and Chikungunya (Togaviridae) and Adeonvirus, which all have very different tissue specificity, and aren't associated with long-term dormancy.

In the case of meningitis, it's not an infection of the brain, but the membrane around the brain. It's caused by lots of bacteria, as well as enteroviruses, which are most commonly associated with the digestive tract. Malaria (which is a eukaryotic parasite) causes both meningitis and encephalitis. All of these things "get into the brain".

Point being: it's not even remotely the same thing. You cannot extrapolate from "inflammation of the brain" to "neurodegeneration". It's like extrapolating from "fever" to "risk of dementia", and just because herpes viruses happen to infect neurons and cause inflammation doesn't imply a causal relationship with neural degeneration.

>just because herpes viruses happen to infect neurons and cause inflammation doesn't imply a causal relationship with neural degeneration

Herpesviruses infect neurons and cause lifelong infections by changing the expression of a variety of proteins in infected cells, thereby evading detection by the immune system. I don’t think we should brush off the possibility of such an infection having long-term neurodegenerative effects (most likely combined with other necessary factors).

> Herpesviruses infect neurons and cause lifelong infections

No, you're abusing terminology to exaggerate. Herpes viruses establish dormancy, which is not the same thing as an active infection.

Are the viruses in the cells, somewhere, in low numbers? We don't actually know (your claim about protein expression change and hiding from the immune system is a hypothesis, not a fact). We know that viruses in the family go dormant -- stop causing visible symptoms -- and periodically recur. There's a huge leap from that to "causes long-term neural cell death and disability".

> I don’t think we should brush off the possibility of such an infection having long-term neurodegenerative effects (most likely combined with other necessary factors).

I'm not saying we should "brush off the possibility". I'm saying that it's a hypothesis, and it needs to be shown to be true before insinuating that it is a known fact.

Guess the whole “roll around in viral soup and lick the elevator buttons” crowd arguing getting sick is healthy as it boosts your immune system is going to have a relatively sad old age.

I noticed that plants I grow in a sterile environment are extraordinarily healthy and vigorous vs those in a similar but unsterile environment. I always drew from that the less a life form has to struggle against it’s environment the more energy it can apply to growth and the more “optimal” the growth will be.

Add in the DNA level damage a virus can cause (not all viral infections of a cell destroys the cell or successfully encodes fully), and other forms of oh gosh that’s not good, tells me it’s just got a great idea to be infected.

So, forgive me, but I plan to wear masks on planes (precovid I got sick on literally every flight over 4 hours - no more!) and during outbreaks of influenza and other nasties. I can train my immune system with vaccines, which don’t actively infect my cells systemically. And the pictures of my thriving plants will be playing in my head the next time some conservative yells at me about natural immunity for wearing a mask.

Plants need many stressors to survive. Like wind, a plant grown in a sterile windless environment is guaranteed to be weaker than a plant grown with some wind to convince it to invest energy in stabilizing itself.
Yes that’s true, they were much less woody despite being more lush and bearing larger and sweeter fruit, and I had to provide stability support to some.

Note however I didn’t say I wasn’t going to exercise are eat only hydroponic mixtures. A viral infection is not the same as adaptation stress, where the former is well demonstrated and I think conclusively good for you in the long term. So, yes, the metaphor isn’t flawless but the point remains. Some viral infections lead to a long term result of cancer, we think according to these and other research easily googled some severe infections leads to increased risk of long term poor neurological outcomes, and I posit with no proof that viral infection contributes to aging. I’ll wager an outcome of COVID will be a bulge in viral infection long term effects, and I’ll further put $5 on my statements above.

The submitted link is broken for me. This one works:

https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-ch...

I was hoping there was some mention of the international zombie apocalpyse alert level.