Cold sores got a lot less fun.
On the upside, this might lead to better treatments.
Oh jeez, that’s awful. I can’t help but people who have herpes now, thinking how their lives will deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease. 
Can you imagine going through life thinking that you’re going to lose all of your memories?
Nothing to add other than that was a truly epic post/sig combination, Ginger.
Ginger, over 60% of the population has herpes in their system, although not all our showing symptoms. A 2005 study suggests over 90% of adults might have herpes in their body. We’re not talking just crotch rashes here but also the common cold sore. Clearly, not everyone with herpes gets Alzheimer’s, although it apparently raises the risk of it.
Color me unconvinced so far. I’ll wait for more and better evidence.
My paternal grandmother had Alzheimer’s. My father had Alzheimer’s. I don’t have to imagine.
I’m just thinking of the poster who got herpes for Christmas last year.
So, is it related to herpes infection around the mouth, or any herpes infection?
God knows I have enough problems with my brain as it is. I’d rather not start developing plaques any time soon.
Or, you know, ever.
Apparently it’s a matter of having herpes at all - while most infections manifest around the mouth they can appear elsewhere, and indeed part of the problem here seems to be herpes migrating to the brain. The issue isn’t where the symptoms show up, but that you have the virus in your body.
But I can’t emphasize enough that this also appears to be just one factor - genetics also seems to play a role as well. As I said before, not everyone with cold sores develops Alzheimer’s so don’t panic over this. Cold sores don’t automatically doom you to memory loss later in life.
This is just another nail in my eventual mental coffin…
This may be the first nail that can come from a screw.
I’ve read the actual journal article, and I’m not that worried. All they showed is that there’s colocalization of DNA from herpes simplex virus 1 (the one that generally causes cold sores, not genital herpes, though I know that’s not absolute) with plaques in brains of both Alzheimer’s patients and healthy elderly controls, there’s just more plaques in people with Alzheimer’s. There’s also a genetic factor that is discussed – the majority of the Alzheimer’s patients had at least one copy of a particular allele of a gene, while the people without Alzheimer’s had different alleles of that gene. All in all, interesting, and worth following up on to see if this is a matter of causation or correlation, but no one should be freaking out just yet that their cold sores are going to turn their brain to mush.
Interesting. My mother, who had Alzheimers, also had a bout of shingles several years before. Granted, that is caused by a different member of the herpes family. But it will be interesting to see if these researchers are indeed on to something. Time will tell.