#28

Sterile inflammation is a hallmark of aging. It causes many processes that we know as aging and sterile inflammation is involved in many age related diseases including ASCVD and Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia. It is much easier to explain it with a process that we know that exists in the body than trying to find a causative external factors.

#29

Is there any trick to getting this vaccine before 50 years old? I see that the FDA only approves shingles vaccines for age 50 and older, but I don’t really want to wait four years.

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#30

If you’re paying out of pocket, try not saying anything and just book an appointment for Shingrix and say you don’t want the disease if they ask.

If for some odd reason capitalism doesn’t work, you could then say that you take rapamycin, an immunosupressant as it’s approved for 18 yrs and above for those with immunosuppression therapy. If they ask you why you take rapa you can say that you don’t want to talk about it etc if that’s the case.

On my local vaccine provider in EU it just says ‘approved for 18 years and above’, even though it’s specifically only for immunosuppresive patients for those below 50. Based capitalism here it appears.

#31

Having virus or bacteria in the brain implies that there will be inflammatory processes in response by the body. Getting infected many times means this happens often.

#32

I posted here earlier about stopping my Rapa use because what I believe is sinutisis. However as I think I said, this is a recurrent problem I have, even before rapa and right now I have it again.

Now I am looking into trying to prevent it and treat it. I was going to get my sinuses scanned many years ago but I opted-out because of the radiation from the CAT scan.

I am wondering if I could maybe treat something with Doxycycline (lifespan benefits in fruit flies etc).

And on the prevention side pneumococcal vaccine, like Prevnar 20 (Apexxnax in EU) that protects against 20 different ones, it came out in 2022. I am also wondering about adding in Pneumovax 23 if there isn’t much overlap between varians of pneumococcal.

What I’ve heard it’s best to start with Prevnar 20 because it creates memory cells and longer-term protection, and then boosting with Pneumovax 23 8 weeks afterwards it boosts the effect of the shared variants.

Thoughts?

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#33

Did you go to see doctor? Were sinuses painful to touch? Green discharge from nose? Fever? Do you have chronic problems with sinuses? How is your nose septum?

Antibiotic of choice for sinusitis is penicillin (family).
You can treat it with doxycycline too, but it is second in line.
If you want to take doxycycline as a senolytic therapy have a look at "Three-drug combination therapy for anti-aging"

I don’t think it is routinely advised for people with healthy immune system between age 5-65. You were probably vaccinated as child? Why would you repeat it? Just dementia prevention? I haven’t really checked anything on this subject, but pneumococcal vaccines are mostly overlap and are used in adults as a single shot. Maybe I am wrong… What benefit do you expect from boosting?

#34

Yes I was treated by someone with a Ph.D other than a M.D but he wanted to do a CAT scan and I didn’t take it, nothing more happened after that. Yes I think I have chronic problems with sinuses, don’t know anything about a nose septum. Basically my forehead seems full, sometimes a lot, especially when sleeping for long. One time after rapamycin I had slight pain around sinuses area when lying down making it hard to sleep. I’ve gotten used to it though. On a rare occasion the fullness can audibly pop around sinuses and it feels like I can almost breathe better. No fever or green discharge.

No I wasn’t vaccinated to pneumococcal as it wasn’t a thing then. It can reduce risk for sinusitis and possibly alzheimer’s too. I think this can solve my sinus problems. I have a runny nose and slight pain in my throat. So it seems to get worse with infections?

#35

I am not questioning your doctor’s credentials :sweat_smile: But I just want to distingush between chronic or acute sinus pain and sinusitis on the other hand.
Chronic sinus pain can be causes by many things, one is personal morphology, chronic (allergic) rhinitis, nose polyps etc. Headaches similar to sinus pain can be caused by poorly opened airways, caused by either again rhinitis, polyps or even deviated septum…
So it is good to investigate what is causing your problems with sinuses so you can act appropriately and reduce the sinus problems.
Bacterial sinusitis is quite troublesome, I had a few in my youth, but they are again presented usually with fever, smelly dark green nose discharge, really painful sinuses susceptible to touch…

#36

My guess is that this has cause and effect backwards. The “wet streets cause downpour” type of logic.

It is likely that people who get the vaccines are healthier, wealthier, wiser, and more focused on their health than the people who don’t. They are likely to have all sorts of better outcomes if we look at them and compare them to the unvaccinated group. The question is: to what degree are those outcomes a result of the vaccination and to what degree are they the result of other factors (i.e. - do to the differences between the groups)?

When one sees large impacts on a disease (Alzheimers) that is not known to be related to the disease (influenza, for instance) the vaccine is protecting against, our expectation should be that we are mostly measuring differences between groups rather than results of the vaccine.

Now, this doesn’t mean we know this is the case - we don’t!, we need different types of studies to determine causality - but it is probably the proper default hypothesis, until disproven.

#37

Herpes Zoster vaccine seems to have causal evidence based on comparing cohort pre- and post introduction.

There’s also seems to be causal evidence for herpes virus EBV and MS.

Even if you consider it to not be causal evidence for the other vaccines or of a lower standard than these studies, the risk-reward could be still good. Where the risk is pretty known and low, and the reward is uncertain but high. So the expected value is good IMO. I thought about reverse causation the other day and it would make sense to me that for example the sickest individuals might not get the vaccine, etc.

4 Likes
#38

Just a general note on vaccines. While they can be very beneficial, there is still always a risk in getting vaccinated and there are also some downsides to getting vaccinated that over the long run might accelerate aging of the immune system somewhat. So while vaccines are certainly beneficial in a lot of cases, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good to get every vaccine under the sun.

2 Likes
#39

Could you elaborate in how getting vaccinated might accelerate aging of the immune system?
The first thing that comes to mind is that you aren’t solely comparing vaccination vs. not vaccination. In an environment of a lot of viruses and bacteria, the alternative might be to get infected or more seriously as many times or more from viruses for example. The vaccines train the immune system, while the viruses are active and wreck havoc on a small or larger scale. The reduction in health and aging from damage from viruses might still be worth preventing for a possible small cost when it comes to an acceleration in aging of the immune system.

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#40

Sure. I am comparing vaccination vs no vaccination when I make this statement, and yes, getting infected is in most cases worse than getting vaccinated.

To elaborate, the risk of getting vaccinated is that whenever you activate the immune system with a vaccine, there is chance that something bad happens, such as your body creating antibodies that cross-react with antibodies on your own cells, leading to minor, or if you’re very unlucky, severe autoimmune reactions. This has nothing specifically to do with vaccines, just the way the immune system works. Granted you get that same risk when you get infected with a pathogen, albeit probably a bit higher risk with getting infected than vaccinated because the immune responses are stronger when infected and the chances of something going wrong higher. The only way to avoid this risk completely is to avoid both infection and vaccination. Of course that is not possible, but what you can do is estimate how likely you are to get some infection and how serious that infection is and then decide on whether to get a vaccine based on that. If you have very low chances of getting some infection, maybe not getting vaccinated is the better choice. Maybe not. It’s hard to say.

As far as potential long term downsides from getting vaccinated. Every time your immune system encounters an “enemy”, be it from a vaccine or an infection, and it responds appropriately, the body will develop immunity to that enemy. It does this by training memory B-cells and T-cells that recognice the antibodies on the enemy so if you get exposed to it in the future your immune system will respond fast and destroy it before you get significantly ill. This is all good, except that each time your body does this, the new memory cells take up immunological space and leave less left for novel future infections.

Here is an analogy. Imagine you live in a city with 1000 police officers. Whenever some terrorist arrives in the city, eventually some police officer catches him and neutralizes him. And when he does so he remembers what he looks like and also hands 9 other police officers a picture of how the terrorist looks like. Now we have 10 officers that know how this terrorist looks like and they now get orders to only look out for this terrorist. If a new terrorist comes in town, the 10 officers will not notice, because they have been dedicated to recognize this single one and be blind to anyone else. This leaves only 990 officers left to recognize new terrorists. Every time a new terrorist arrives, ten new officers get dedicated to recognize that one and the number of remaining officers decreases. In many years you might end up having 500 officers dedicated to varioius terrorists that have entered the city leaving you with only 500 left to recognize new ones. This makes the police in the city half as efficient at recognizing new terrorists than in the beginning when you had 1000 officers free to recognize new ones because the total space only allows for 1000 officers in the city. The immune system is a bit similar in that there is only room for so many B- and T-cells in the body. Some of them are naive and ready to recognize new pathogens. Every time you get exposed to a pathogen or a vaccine, a number of B- and T-cells gets dedicated to that pathogen and the number of naive B- and T-cells decreases. This is one reason why immunity declines with age and why old people don’t respond as well to vaccines as young people. They don’t have as many police officers that are free to recognize new enemies because so many of them have been dedicated to recognize some old enemy.

This is how every time you get exposed to vaccines or catch an infection your immune system gets older in at least one aspect, that is, the immunological space decreases. Granted this won’t be a problem for average people until they get quite old and their immunological space gets pretty full, but if you’re thinking about longevity, this may be a factor worth considering. I would think that if someone were to get most of the available vaccines for all kinds of diseases in the course of one year, I bet that his responses to new infections and vaccines would decline significantly reflecting aging of his immune system.

In contrary to this. It’s pretty clear that getting infected with a pathogen is usually far worse than getting vaccinated against that pathogen because when you get infected you usually get a much stronger inflammatory reaction which is harmful for aging. So in a lot of cases if you have good chances of catching something, getting vaccicnated against it is probably a good idea. If on the other hand, the chances of you catching something is very low, then maybe you should weight the options and consider skipping the vaccine.

Just to be clear. I have nothing against vaccines. I’m just pointing out that there is no such thing as free lunch here. Everything has downsides.

5 Likes
#41

Could a simple calculation be then that a vaccination is preferred if the vaccine that is taken will prevent at least (1) infection within the immune period? If the efficacy is 50% for example, then it would be (2) infections. Since the pathogen is worse than the vaccine, maybe 40% for a young person it could be 0.6 and 1.2 infections instead, maybe. It depends how solid the Alzheimer’s data is for example as well. What would your numbers be?

How do you stand with regards to Valaciclovir, an antiviral, taken as a prophylactic to prevent infection from the herpesvirus family (Shingles - Alzheimers, EBV - Multiple sclerosis, etc)?

#42

Very interesting:

Toll-like receptor 4 and CD11b expressed on microglia coordinate eradication of Candida albicans cerebral mycosis

Microbes, including fungi, routinely infect the brain, but specific immune pathways are undefined. Wu et al. show that Candida albicans activates microglia through two mechanisms involving the production of amyloid b-like peptides that signal through TLR4 and candidalysin that activates CD11b, together promoting clearance of albicans from the brain

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(23)01252-4.pdf

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#43

Michael Lustgarten has a video on Rapamycin and Candida that shows huge effect on Rapamycin and Candida infections in the brain, basically if you use Rapamycin you will have very little Candida growth and almost none in the blood stream witch equals much lower incidences of Alzheimers. Coincidence, I don’t think so.

5 Likes
#44

Can you please post the video?

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#45

I don’t have it, I cam across it on youtube a couple of months ago. But it is not like his typical videos, it’s a stand out. I will try to find it later today.

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#46

Here is the video:

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#47

More: Google Scholar

1 Like