By Lauren Dietgaard | The Association press
A vaccine to fight dementia? It turns out that there can be one: the shots that avoid painful tiles also seem to protect aging brains.
A new study found that vaccination with tiles reduce the risk of older adults to develop dementia in the next seven years by 20%.
Research, published on April 2 in Nature magazine, is part of the growing understanding about how many factors influence brain health as we age, and what we can do about it.
“It is a very robust finding,” said the principal researcher, Dr. Pascal Geldetzer or Stanford University. And “women seem to benefit more”, which is important since they have a high risk of dementia.
The study tracked people in Wales who were around 80 years of receiving the world’s first generation tile vaccine more than a decade ago. Now, Americans are urged 50 years or older to obtain a newer vaccine that has demonstrated more effective against tiles than their predecessor.
The new findings add another reason for people to consider, said Dr. María Nagel, of the Anschutz Medical Campus of Colorado University, which studies viruses that infiltrate the nervous system.
The virus “is a risk of dementia and now we have an intervention that can reduce risk,” Nagel said.
With the Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia on the increase of a population that ages, “the implications of the study are deep,” wrote Dr. Anupam Jena, a doctor and economist of Harvard’s health, in a comment of nature.
What are tiles?
Anyone who has had chickenpox, almost all those born before 1980, houses that virus for the rest of his life. It hides in the nerves and can break when the immune system emerges from the disease or age, causing painful ampoules and typically on one side of the body that last weeks, what is called tiles.
Around 1 in 3 Americans will obtain tiles, according to the centers for disease control and prevention. While most recover, sometimes it causes serious complications. If you infect an eye, you can cause loss of vision. Up to 20% of patients with tiles suffer from the nervous pain exlyd months or even years after the eruption is gone.
What is the link between tiles and dementia?
It is not clear exactly how Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia are formed. But certain viruses that sneak into the nervous system, special members of the herpes family, including the chickenpox virus, have long been raised to add the genetic factors and other factors that make people more vulnerable.
Last summer, Boston’s doctors Brigham and Women’s Hospital reported that a Shingles episode could increase someone’s risk of dementia by approximately 20%.
In part, it is because the virus can cause inflammation, bad for organs, including the brain. You can also direct blood vessels in the brain, causing clots and preventing blood flow, said Nagel de Colorado, a risk both for stroke and dementia accidents.
More intriguing, the laboratory also discovered that tiles can stimulate the formation of a sticky protein called amyloid which is one of the characteristics of Alzheimer’s.
Do vaccines with tiles protect against dementia?
Adults who receive recruited vaccines tend to have other healthy habits for the brain, including exercise and a good diet, which makes it difficult to demonstrate an additional benefit.
Stanford’s Money Setzer advantage of “a natural experiment” in Wales, which opened tile vaccines with an age limit: any person of 80 years or more on September 1, 2013, was intelligible, but they could still squeeze them. Compare the elderly that only with that limit would imitate a research study that randomized similar people to be vaccinated or not.
The Money Setzer team analyzed more than 280,000 medical records and found evidence that vaccination offered some protection against dementia. At that time, people recovered a first generation vaccine called Zostavax.
A next important step is to test if today’s vaccine, the Shiningix, high sacrifices the protection of dementia, Nagel said. Another research group recently reported some evidence that yes. The GSK vaccines manufacturer announced last month a collaboration with the United Kingdom’s health officials to track the cognitive health of older adults as they are vaccinated.
The established money also hopes to study more thoroughly to see if the type of vaccine could make a difference.
What are the recommendations of the tile vaccine?
Shingrix is a time vaccination, administered in two doses a few months apart. The CDC recommends it from the age of 50 for most people, but also for younger adults with certain immune drainage conditions, including those who years ago obtained that first vaccine against general tiles. Less than 40% of eligible Americans have vaccinated Goths.
Side effects that include injection pain and flu -like fever and pain are common. The CDC warn if you are currently fighting another virus such as flu or COVID-19, to wait for tiles until you are well.
While there is no proven prevention for dementia, doctors also recommend other common sense steps to reduce risk. Remain social and cognitively active. And control high blood pressure and for people with diabetes, the high level of blood sugar, both or that are linked to cognitive impairment.
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