Alzheimer's risk 10 times lower with herpes medication
A few loosely related thoughts:<p>Background: HSV1 is commonly known as cold sores. Some people get them in their mouth, or on their lips. Most of the population don&#x27;t develop any symptoms.<p>This link between HSV1 and Alzheimer&#x27;s could be big business. The numbers are wildly divergent, but it sounds like a sizable chunk of the US population has HSV1. I&#x27;ve seen estimates from 20% to 80%. Even if it&#x27;s the very conservative 20% number, that&#x27;s still a big market.<p>The skeptic in me (his name is David) is suspicious of this article precisely because it has the potential to be such a big market. Case in point, there&#x27;s a link to some HSV1 medicine at the bottom of the article. I wonder if they have an affiliate marketing arrangement with the makers of acyclovir. Tangentially related, I think that this article is on the front page of HN precisely because HSV1 is so widespread. For example, if another article discussed a cure for Alzheimer&#x27;s, but that article involved some rare condition that does not affect the general population, would that article hit page #1?<p>With that said, I think our society&#x27;s lax approach to HSV1 is bizarre. In Sex Ed, I didn&#x27;t get any education around the fact that kissing people and sharing drinks can spread a virus. After reading quite a few articles on the virus, I got the impression that STD researchers don&#x27;t really know much about it. I could be wildly incorrect about that last point, I&#x27;m not a medical expert. It&#x27;s just the general impression I got when trying to understand HSV1 from an STD perspective. For example, it&#x27;s been common wisdom for a long time that, if you have HSV1 (cold sores), then you can&#x27;t get HSV2 (genital herpes). But the reality seems to be more ambiguous than that.  Apparently there was a fairly recent study mentioning that college students who have HSV1 performed oral sex on their partners and transferred HSV1 to the partner&#x27;s genitals. Or something like that.<p>Long story short, although I&#x27;m skeptical of the business incentives around associating HSV1 with something as scary as Alzheimer&#x27;s, I welcome more research around understanding HSV1.