U.S. researchers analysed the medical records of several hundred people in the UK and
At the first stage, researchers studied medicalrecords of 300,000 people stored in FinnGen, the Finnish national data bank. They looked for people diagnosed with one of six neurodegenerative disorders: Alzheimer's disease, multiple or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, generalized or vascular dementia, and Parkinson's disease. And then they checked whether patients with such diagnoses had previously been to hospitals due to a viral infection (except for cases of coronovirus infection).
They initially found 45 associations betweendiagnosis and previous viral infection. An additional analysis using data from 500,000 Britons from UKBiobank reduced this number to 22 links - a statistically significant correlation between past infection and the development of a neurodegenerative disease.
The study showed that the most connections withvarious viruses observed in generalized dementia: the development of such a disorder was preceded by a variety of infections: viral encephalitis, viral warts, all types of influenza and viral pneumonia. The strongest link was found between encephalitis and Alzheimer's disease: patients who were diagnosed with this viral disease were 20 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's later.
Further analysis showed that only six addictions appear five or more years after a viral infection, the rest are temporary.
It should be noted that the people we studied did notwere sick with a cold. Because of the infections, they were so sick that they had to go to the hospital. The fact that widely used vaccines reduce the risk or severity of many of the viral diseases observed in this study raises the possibility that the risks of neurodegenerative diseases can also be reduced.
Michael Knolls, study co-author
Neurodegenerative disorders damagevarious parts of the nervous system. It usually occurs in adulthood or old age and causes many problems, including thinking, remembering, and moving.
Although the current study does not identify cause-and-effect relationships that lead to disorders in the nervous system, it does highlightthose significant areas that need to be studied in the future.
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