The Shingles Virus May Be Aging You More Quickly [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/shingles-virus-aging/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/FCEoR

IN 2010, A university lecturer from Colorado started experiencing worrying signs of cognitive decline.

The lecturer—a 63-year-old viral immunologist whose identity has been kept anonymous—suffered alarming symptoms, including impaired memory, waning concentration, and difficulty reading. While giving lectures to students, he found he had difficulty focusing and was often unable to finish sentences without pausing. But medical tests, including a brain biopsy, failed to get to the source of the problem, and over the next four years, his symptoms continued to progress.

His decline would have likely continued unabated had he not heard about a case of encephalitis—serious brain inflammation caused by a reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus, most commonly associated with childhood chickenpox and, later in life, shingles.

Remembering that his own symptoms had been preceded by a brief case of shingles, subsequent tests confirmed the patient had indeed experienced a reactivation of varicella-zoster. And so he decided to treat the problem with a course of acyclovir, an antiviral drug commonly prescribed to shingles patients. To his colleagues’ amazement, the Colorado lecturer’s symptoms quickly faded away and his cognition returned to normal.

This remarkable case study, published in 2016, has inspired neurovirologists to look deeper into the connection between shingles and brain aging. For decades, shingles has been predominantly associated with a form of nerve pain known as postherpetic neuralgia, which can be so severe that it was once cited as the leading cause of pain-related suicide in the elderly. Now, research is starting to reveal the devastating impact that shingles can have on brain health.

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