There's a lot more to the relationship between pathogens and neurological conditions. This article has some good information: <a href="https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/" rel="nofollow">https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/</a> (Please ignore the clickbaity tone, there's actually good stuff here).<p>We know there are a ton of correlations. We don't have causal links, although there is quite a bit of speculation about inflammation.
Related: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and <i>not</i> developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinations against diseases that people normally do not get. This hints at a reason other than simply „avoided disease“.<p>Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781</a><p>I wrote a summary in this comment:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161</a>
What is this “may” - syphilis has been known to do this fairly directly for a long time, long before Tuskegee or anything like that.<p>it shouldn’t be surprising that more viruses do this (the reality seems more to be that traditionally viruses that cross the blood brain barrier, like most things, result in rapid death so no real time for people to show symptoms we’d call neurodegenerwtion)
Many who have had chicken pox still have the virus living dormant in their neurons. The virus can randomly reactivate and causes a painful skin lesions called shingles.
Guess the whole “roll around in viral soup and lick the elevator buttons” crowd arguing getting sick is healthy as it boosts your immune system is going to have a relatively sad old age.<p>I noticed that plants I grow in a sterile environment are extraordinarily healthy and vigorous vs those in a similar but unsterile environment. I always drew from that the less a life form has to struggle against it’s environment the more energy it can apply to growth and the more “optimal” the growth will be.<p>Add in the DNA level damage a virus can cause (not all viral infections of a cell destroys the cell or successfully encodes fully), and other forms of oh gosh that’s not good, tells me it’s just got a great idea to be infected.<p>So, forgive me, but I plan to wear masks on planes (precovid I got sick on literally every flight over 4 hours - no more!) and during outbreaks of influenza and other nasties. I can train my immune system with vaccines, which don’t actively infect my cells systemically. And the pictures of my thriving plants will be playing in my head the next time some conservative yells at me about natural immunity for wearing a mask.
The submitted link is broken for me. This one works:<p><a href="https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-chances-developing-alzheimers-or-other-neurodegenerative-disease" rel="nofollow">https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/could-viral-illness-increase-ch...</a>