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Serious Infections Linked to Dementia Risk, Study Shows
"Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term." A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy...
The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had already associated infection with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease" and provides a "useful dataset," said Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other recent studies have found that the flu shot and the shingles vaccine reduce the risk of subsequent dementia in those who get them. And the article also includes this quote from Kristen Funk, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who studies neuroinflammation in neuroinfectious and neurodegenerative diseases).
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