I’ve been thinking about the post below, and I’ll share those thought with you. First, what do we know? We know that older people who get flu shots are less likely to demonstrate Alzheimer’s. And we now know that those who get the stronger dosage are even less likely to get Alzheimer’s.
From this I reason as follows. What does a flu immunization do in your body? It stimulates antibodies to fight the viral influenza infection. More generally, it ‘gooses’ the immune system, wakes it up and gives it work to do. If the stronger vaccine does more of this, and if less Alzheimer’s is the result, then somehow the immune system also fights Alzheimer’s. I don’t believe we already knew this for sure.
Reasoning further, I speculate perhaps some infectious agent - at present unknown or causatively unrecognized - is involved in causing Alzheimer’s. And this “agent” - be it virus, microbe, or ?? - shares some aspects of its nature with the influenza virus such that antibodies against the one also are somewhat active against the other.
File the following speculation under “wild guess.” My hunch is that the culprit is some long-lingering virus similar to the chicken pox (varicella-zoster) virus that, in ways unsuspected, causes or accelerates Alzheimer’s years or decades after first infecting the host. It may be no coincidence that most Alzheimer’s cases manifest after the immune system becomes less active around age 65.
