Herpes Is Linked To Alzheimer's, According To A New Study

A new commentary on a study by Taiwanese epidemiologists at University of Edinburgh and University of Manchester has supported the viability for a possible way to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. When the subjects suffering from severe herpes were looked over by the Taiwanese authors and given high doses of antiviral drugs, the risk of dementia went down by a factor of 10. The paper was published in Neurotherapeutics in February 2018 by Tzeng et Al. Edinburgh's professor Richard Lathe and Manchester's professor Ruth Itzhaki commented on the paper saying that herpes simplex virus type (HSV1) leads to an increased risk of having the disease.

This article along with 2 others presented by different Taiwanese research groups are the first kind to provide any causal link between the two diseases. The commentary was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease on three articles that provided a strong yet causal link between Herpes and Alzheimer's. The commentary backs 30 years of research by Professor Itzhaki. The study compared 8362 subjects who had severe HSV infection with 25086 people who had no HSV infection. They found that development of dementia was increased by a factor of 2542 in HSV group. But when treated with antiviral therapy, dementia reduced 10 times.

Alzheimer's affect 30 million people worldwide and elderly have to suffer a lot because of it. Most researchers in the area investigate the main characteristics of the disease and yet, the cause of the formation of the disease is unknown.

By: Neha Maheshwari

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180712100515.htm