Neurogenerative diseases such asAlzheimer and the Parkinson they could have a link to the flu and other common viruses. It is the result of research published in “Neuron” and taken up by the journal “Nature”, which surveyed the files of 450,000 patients.
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What the research says
The analysis found at least 22 links between viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases. Some of the viral exposures have been associated with an increased risk of brain disease up to 15 years after infection. “It’s surprising how widespread these associations seem, given both the number of viruses and the number of neurodegenerative diseases involved,” says Matthew Miller, an immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
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Association with viral encephalitis
In the past, other studies have tried to demonstrate links between viruses and neurodegenerative diseases. But many of these studies have only looked at a single virus and a specific brain disease. In this case, the research team looked at information from around 35,000 people with brain diseases and around 310,000 people without, sourced from FinnGen, a large Finnish database that includes health information.
The researchers found 45 significant links between infections and brain disease, then tested them against more than 100,000 pieces of information from another database, the UK Biobank. After this analysis, they found 22 significant pairings. One of the clearest associations was between viral encephalitis, a rare inflammation of the brain that can be caused by multiple types of viruses, and Alzheimer’s disease. People with encephalitis were about 31 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease later in life than people who didn’t have encephalitis.
The critique of research
Kjetil Bjornevik, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, compliments colleagues on the study, but warns that their approach to using medical records “could be problematic” because they only looked at infections that were severe enough to warrant a trip to a doctor. “Considering milder infections could weaken the associations,” he says.
Analysis found at least 22 links between viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases. But researchers caution that it’s still unclear how or whether the infections trigger disease onset. https://t.co/tN7khaRMsi
— nature (@Nature) January 24, 2023
Last updated: Tuesday 24 January 2023, 3:05 pm
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