What if Alzheimers disease ends up being like Me/CFS?

The majority of cases is triggered by viral/bacterial infections, but a small minority can be triggered by traumatic injury or extended physical stress.

https://www.statnews.com/2024/01/29/first-transmitted-alzheimers-disease-cases-growth-hormone-cadavers/

Imagine writing this paper and not going much deeper into the “flat line” (can’t imagine, nor can anyone who’s good with statistics or data in any capacity)

For women only:

Abysmal statistics; incomplete literature

But probably true (shingles vax has been shown to inhibit beta h-viruses more generally; and female brains already show very different responses to dementia risk factors)

Not sure why it takes four people to write a mediocre paper (epidemiology has the talent depth of the average car wash ) but conclusions look sound

https://twitter.com/PGeldsetzer1/status/1661776663074738176?s=19

@LachlanMunro Relevant link from that Tweet: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v1

Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases

The root causes of dementia are still largely unclear, and the medical community lacks highly effective preventive and therapeutic pharmaceutical agents for dementia despite large investments into their development. There is growing interest in the question if infectious agents play a role in the de…

Basically they compared people born a week before versus a week after a cutoff date for eligibility for that vaccine, and found a 20%-ish reduction in dementia diagnosis in the latter group. (Still pending peer review.)

Suppose if you decided e.g. you had a 75% confidence that pathogens explained>=30% of Alzheimer's disease cases. What would this resolve to?

How about a 50% confidence it explains 50% of cases?

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)01147-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322011473%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/selection/natural/human/2000-cochran.pdf

I think main cause it's probably going to be diabetes type 3, but there might be multiple causes

If it is multiple causes and one of them is a pathogen, but it is not the main one, how does this resolve?

@egroj Thanks for the question. Thinking about it further, I think it will be difficult to say which is the “root cause”, so I changed the question to just a cause. If anyone needs a refund, let me know.