Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer

I do think there's another important potential mechanism here as well, which is that we're increasingly realizing that vaccines appear to have broader effects on the immune system beyond the specific antibody response that they've been designed to elicit.

and that this may not just provide protection against some other pathogens, but also potentially against some chronic diseases.

And we know that these effects vary strongly by vaccine type and often particularly strong for life-attenuated vaccines.

So in our natural experiments using these date-of-birth cutoffs, we have always been studying the life-attenuated jingles vaccine

And so I think it's really important that a clinical trial is done on this vaccine.

That's a vaccine we've got the strongest evidence for.

It's an off-patent vaccine.

Essentially, it's a little commercial interest.

So that's sort of my dream at the moment.

I'm trying to generate funds from philanthropy, private foundations to run a clinical trial of this vaccine for a dementia effect.

Yes.

Yeah, so I think there's a particularly high level of biological plausibility for the virus that causes shingles later in life, which is the chickenpox virus.

Because it is what's called a neurotropic virus, so it preferentially targets your nervous system.

We also know that these reactivations of the virus, as it remains hibernated in your nervous system for life, it's in this constant interplay with the immune system, causes these reactivations and they cause some sort of inflammatory process in the nervous system, including effects on blood vessels that Helen has mentioned.

So that these inflammatory processes, essentially we know chronic inflammation is sort of a bad thing for many chronic diseases, right?

And so it's not far-fetched to think that this may have consequences for dementia disease development.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And I think it's both the role of pathogens, of infections in chronic diseases, but potentially also the role of the immune system and immune aging and sort of trying to counteract immune aging later in life through vaccination.

If we understand these mechanisms better, I think it could lead to so many insights, so many new tools in the future for prevention and treatment of

I think it's a really important area of research.