Is There a Link between the Herpes Virus and Alzheimer’s?

Health Wellness

Image result for Herpes Virus and Alzheimer’s

Researchers have been searching for causes of Alzheimer’s disease over 70 years. Many ideas have been posted, including drinking beverages from aluminum cans. In fact, there are still some people who won’t drink any canned beverage for the fear of developing Alzheimer’s or some other mental disorder. Other culprits accused of causing Alzheimer’s includes regular use of aspartame, having silver fillings in your teeth and even getting flu shots.

Among the things suspected of causing Alzheimer’s back in the early 1950s were viruses. Over the years, the idea of viruses being a factor of causing or leading to Alzheimer’s has been pretty much discarded by most in the medical community, that is, until now.

Dr. Benjamin Readhead, an assistant research professor at Arizona State University and adjunct faculty member at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was conducting an extensive study of brain tissue in hopes of finding a drug that could help with the tangles associated with Alzheimer’s. His team looked at the brains of nearly 1,000 people, some who had and some who didn’t have Alzheimer’s. As part of their study, they ran genetic testing for RNA and DNA, just to see if they could find anything that might help them treat the fatal disease. According to Readhead, the genetic testing:

“That actually kind of led us down this rabbit hole where we started suspecting that viruses could [explain] some of what we were seeing in these Alzheimer’s disease networks.”

They found a considerable amount of non-human genetic material and then after sifting it from the human genetic material, they ran their results through a genetic database that contains information on over 500 different viruses.

Some of their results were surprising, such as finding forms of herpes viruses in nearly every sample. They say this is because most of us are exposed to them while we are still infants and the virus or remnants of it remain trapped in our brains for the rest of our lives.

However, one discovery they made did surprise them and is reviving the long scoffed at notion that viruses may be linked to Alzheimer’s, according to the report:

“Though the idea of a virus or bacterium playing a role in Alzheimer’s development has not been historically well-regarded, previous research has looked at the idea. In particular, past research has pointed to connections between Alzheimer’s disease and the herpes simplex virus one, or HSV1 (the form of herpes virus that typically causes cold sores).”

‘But in the new study, two different strains of the herpes virus stood out: herpes 6A and herpes 7.”

“And while it may sound startling to learn that there are strains of herpes in the brain, ‘the thing to say about these viruses is that they’re very, very common,’ Readhead said. (Nearly everyone carries these herpes strains in their bodies because they are infected with them in infancy. However, the strains don’t typically cause problems other than rashes in young children.) In fact, the researchers detected the presence of these viruses in about 40 to 50 percent of the brain tissues examined in the study. But the Alzheimer’s brain samples had many more copies of these viruses than those without, he said.”

Readhead is being careful NOT to say that these herpes viruses caused the Alzheimer’s, especially since they were also found in non-Alzheimer’s brains, but he isn’t dismissing the idea that somehow, there is some kind of mechanism that was different in the Alzheimer’s brains that resulted in a different reaction to the viruses. One of the things he did was to look to see if the viruses were somehow impacting different proteins or genes that have been linked to Alzheimer’s. In that endeavor, Readhead commented:

“There were actually quite a few different viruses that we saw [connected] in some interesting ways to different aspects of Alzheimer’s.”

“One of the real outstanding questions to this is trying to determine the extent [to which] what we’re seeing could be a causal contributor to the disease.”

As in most cases, there is more research needed to answer the many questions created by such a discovery, but one can’t help but hope that what Readhead has discovered might bring us one step closer to finding a cause and then a cure or treatment for Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer's Herpes

Related Posts