Anyone who has seen a loved one will fall into the fog of dementia and will know that aging neurodegenerative diseases can cause great harm.
Dementia Suffering at the moment More than 55 million people worldwide; in the United States, More than 6 million people – About 10 lives in the 10 years of age over 65-suffering from dementia. Now, the economic cost of treatment and the cost of care for these patients are usually over $600 billion. This number will only grow as our population ages, and one of the estimates predicts the number of people with dementia Will double by 2060. This is the fate that many of us will suffer one day – according A recent studyadults over 55 years old end up with nearly one-half chances.
But this week offers one of the highlights in an otherwise dark field. according to Research after more than 280,000 people in WalesDuring the seven years with unvaccinated vaccination, the likelihood of receiving the vaccine was 20% lower.
This may be important. In addition to good lifestyle habits Get enough sleep and exercise. It is known that the possibility that cheap vaccines can provide real protection makes very meaningful. We have good reason to be confident in these findings: While this study is perhaps the most prominent of showing the protective effects of shingles vaccines, others Research The conclusions of the vaccine are similar.
In addition to the hope of preventing treatment, the new study adds further evidence Growing research Raises the possibility that we have been thinking about neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. These terrible diseases may be caused by viruses, and if so, eliminating the virus is enough to prevent or treat the disease.
To understand why new shingles vaccine research is so big, it helps to understand how medical research is conducted.
The gold standard for the study was a randomized controlled trial (RCT). At that time, scientists randomly assigned patients to two different groups (one for experimental treatment and the other for non-experimental treatment) to test the effectiveness of treatment or intervention. This RCT trial minimizes bias or other complex factors, allowing scientists to reasonably be convinced that any differences between the two groups, such as the possibility of developing a disease, are due to the treatments studied.
In the real world, RCT is Often difficult and expensive. On the one hand, you need a large sample size to be confident in your results and the control group is unable to receive the treatment studied, which can cause ethical problems.
Therefore, many large medical research involves observational research, a strange term for scientists who observe what is happening in the real world and draw conclusions from their research. The advantage is that you don’t need to spend time and trouble gathering a large research group and randomly splitting it into two. The downside is that you are not quite sure that any observed effects are due to the variables you cannot control the studied. You just observe it,
However, the new study takes advantage of the quirks of Welsh’s health policy to do better. Starting September 1, 2013, anyone 79 years old in Wales is eligible for free shingles vaccine. (Those younger people under the age of 79 will be eligible.) However, for reasons that the vaccine is less effective against the vaccine, no one over the age of 80 will qualify.
The result is what is called “Natural experiments. “In fact, Wales created two essentially identical groups – except for the fact that one received a shingles vaccine, one group did not.
The researchers studied health records of more than 280,000 adults at the start of the vaccination program, but did not have dementia. They focus on a group that is only on the dividing line: those who are over 80 years old by September 1, 2013 and therefore qualify for the vaccine, and those born after that date, they do not. Then, they just looked at what happened to them.
By 2020, seven years after the vaccination program began, about one in eight older people (by then 86 and 87) had developed dementia. But 20% of the groups receiving shingles vaccine Fewer May be diagnosed with this condition. Since researchers can’t find other confounding factors that might explain the difference (such as years of education, other vaccines, or the health status of diabetes), they are confident that the shingles vaccine is different.
A new paradigm for dementia research?
As Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford University, he was not involved in the research Tell the New York Timesresearch shows that shingle vaccines appear to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects of dementia, which we know may be available in practice.”
But it is a vaccine designed to prevent shingles. Why do this also Does it seem to help dementia?
Scientists believe it may be related to inflammation. Shingles or shingles are caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, which sleeps dormant in nerve cells after the first infection and may wake up after decades, causing a painful rash.
This reactivation causes intense inflammation around nerve cells, and chronic inflammation is increasingly considered to be The main factors of cognitive deterioration. By preventing shingles, vaccines can indirectly prevent neuroinflammation associated with dementia.
What about amyloid and tau plaques found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease It has long been considered the main cause of the disease? These may actually be the body’s response to potential infections. This can help explain why treatments targeting these plaques directly To a large extent invalid – Because they are not for actual reasons.
As promising as new research is, we are still a long way from the silver bullet targeting Alzheimer’s and dementia. one Double-blind RCT – The gold standard for medical gold standards is now underway to investigate whether Valacyclovir is an antiviral drug targeting the virus that causes shingles and can slow down cognitive decline in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. That would be the real game changer.
The version of this story originally appeared in The Good Newsletter. Register here!
