cientists have always been great kidders. The latest wisecrack comes
from some wisenheimer Alzheimer researcher who says picking your nose
causes Alzheimer's disease. The idea is that scraping those mucus membranes
damages them, allowing viruses—which, according to one theory, may
cause AD—to move from the nose to the brain.
No doubt when your were little, your grandmother advised you to stop jamming your carrots up there because it's not as funny as you think, but even Grandma probably never said you'd die from it. Mostly she'd just say she won't take you to a presidential reception ever again if you didn't stop.
Maybe, you might say, we need a longitudinal study: take 1500 patients, tell 500 to use a Kleenex, 500 to just use their sleeve, and tell the rest—the control group perhaps—to just jam a pool cue up it. Then see what happens in twenty years.
But the virus theory is nothing to sneeze at.
Now that beta-amyloid, once the bogeyman in the field, has become so unfashionable that even the NIH is turning up its nose to it, the virus theory has become a big topic. The field is starting to look like the cancer field thirty years ago, when virtually anything you ate or drank was suspected of causing cancer. In those days people were so confused they thought drinking alcohol and coffee both caused cancer and prevented it. Then tumor suppressors and oncogenes were discovered and they started to make progress.
Cancer protects against Alzheimer's disease, but why?
Even though the symptoms of these two diseases are distinctly different, they appear very similar on the molecular level. Indeed, we now know the top risk factors for cancer and AD are nearly identical: age, genetic polymorphisms, obesity, hormones, viruses, and chronic inflammation. For AD that means ApoE4, PM2.5 particles, a lack of sex hormones, and HSV-1. And the best way to get stuff into your brain is to administer it nasally. The nose is a suspect because the brain areas where Alzheimer's starts—the locus coeruleus and the entorhinal cortex—are the areas closest to what scientists call da schnoz.
The evidence is now overwhelming thanks to several large-scale longitudinal studies that cancer really does decrease the risk for AD, even after correcting for lifespan. It's not just an artifact of pathologists only stating one COD on death certificates as people originally thought. Many labs, including my own, are studying what the connection might be.
Until very recently cancer treatment consisted mainly of drugs that damaged your DNA or prevented your cells from repairing its DNA. When a cell then tried to divide, as cancer cells are wont to do, its DNA would be so catastrophically screwed up that the cell would go into apoptosis and die. So one possibility is that those anticancer drugs somehow also lowered the risk for Alzheimer's.
So how does Covid fit in?
Very easily! So, like a 1973 Chevy Vega with bad carburetor—as if there were any other kind—the schnoz joke may have backfired. If jamming stuff up your nose causes Alzheimer's disease, what will happen to all those poor bastards who had giant Q-tips jammed back into their sinuses, many of them multiple times, when being tested for Covid? Those Q-tips would have compromised the membranes even if they were sterile (which they wouldn't be once they touched your nose).
It may seem unlikely: Covid gets through the nasal membrane just fine without any help from your doctor. And the virus theory of Alzheimer's is still mostly speculation. We're still looking for the ultimate trigger, but the biggest risk factors in AD will always be aging and the compromised self-repair mechanisms caused by mutant ApoE.
There are a zillion papers discussing the possible connections between Covid and AD. Sniffing out the various risk factors won't be easy. But maybe it's not a bad idea to stop jamming stuff up there, whether it's carrots or gigantic Q-tips. Just to be on the safe side. Because you never know.
That's the problem with group hysteria: the humans get so obsessed with trying to fix one problem they don't realize they're actually creating a dozen new ones.
nov 06 2022, 3:51 am
