Is There A Viral Component To The Development Of Alzheimer's Disease?

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Does a specific viral infection (or infections) contribute to the emergence of Alzheimer's disease?

Well...

A new paper in the scientific journal Neuron suggests this might be the case, based on both clinical correlation studies and functional experimental data.

The paper is....Here.

And you will find a very thoughtful, understandable and, perhaps most importantly, mostly hype-free commentary on the findings and implications in a Science Blogs post by Derek Lowe: 

"...A team led out of a Mt. Sinai research group has gone over a pretty large sample of Alzheimer’s brain tissue (622 patients who died with the disease, and over three hundred control brains as well), sequencing infectious organism DNA, looking for changes in the proteome, etc. They find that aging brains in normal patients display plenty of viral signatures (as indeed is probably the case in many other tissues). But the Alzheimer's disease samples were particularly enriched in herpesviruses 6A and 7, a result that repeated across three independent cohorts from different geographical locations...

{snip}

...But are these viruses a cause of the disease, or are they something that shows up later? That is, do HHV 6A/7 give you Alzheimer’s, or does having Alzheimer’s bring on those viral infections? This has been the problem with many previous proposals for an infectious agent, and it’s a very difficult objection to overcome. I think that this is the first study, though, that has made it over that hurdle. The paper shows that viral DNA is, in fact, incorporated into neurons from the affected regions of the brain. What’s more, analysis of both protein and mRNA levels suggest that such infection produces changes in several transcriptional regulators (specifically, a set of zinc-finger transcription factors and G-quadraplex-associated proteins) that in turn affect expression of a number of very suggestive proteins downstream..."

It looks to be a pretty impressive, and potentially important, body of work. Furthermore, apparently there is more like it coming, independently, from another group.

But....Just to be clear, this is not in my field so it is entirely possible that I might be missing something obvious on the rigour side of the ledger.

Still, it made for most interesting reading late on an early summer Friday afternoon.


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In case you haven't noticed, Mr. Lowe's blog and some other life/bio/medical sciency stuff can be found regularly over on the left side bar....I'll probably have more to say about this kind of stuff in the future as I struggle to occasionally fling myself from the endless poli-writing obsession cycles...


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