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Herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA is located within Alzheimer's disease amyloid plaques

2008· article· en· 456 citations· W2088177247 on OpenAlex· 10.1002/path.2449

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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian funderA Canadian agency funded it. The work may carry no Canadian affiliation at all.

No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Machine scores (provisional)

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Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.334
Teacher spread
0.275 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

The brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers are characterized by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. However, the cause(s) of these features and those of the disease are unknown, in sporadic cases. We previously showed that herpes simplex virus type 1 is a strong risk factor for Alzheimer's disease when in the brains of possessors of the type 4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE-epsilon4), and that beta-amyloid, the main component of plaques, accumulates in herpes simplex virus type 1-infected cell cultures and mouse brain. The present study aimed to elucidate the relationship of the virus to plaques by determining their proximity in human brain sections. We used in situ polymerase chain reaction to detect herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA, and immunohistochemistry or thioflavin S staining to detect amyloid plaques. We discovered a striking localization of herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA within plaques: in Alzheimer's disease brains, 90% of the plaques contained the viral DNA and 72% of the DNA was associated with plaques; in aged normal brains, which contain amyloid plaques at a lower frequency, 80% of plaques contained herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA but only 24% of the viral DNA was plaque-associated (p < 0.001). We suggest that this is because in aged normal individuals, there is a lesser production and/or greater removal of beta-amyloid (Abeta), so that less of the viral DNA is seen to be associated with Abeta in the brain. Our present data, together with our finding of Abeta accumulation in herpes simplex virus type 1-infected cells and mouse brain, suggest that this virus is a major cause of amyloid plaques and hence probably a significant aetiological factor in Alzheimer's disease. They point to the usage of antiviral agents to treat the disease and possibly of vaccination to prevent it.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
The Journal of Pathology
Topic
Alzheimer's disease research and treatments
Field
Medicine
Canadian institutions
Funders
Henry Smith CharityAlzheimer Society
Keywords
Herpes simplex virusVirologyAlzheimer's diseaseVirusSenile plaquesPathologyBiologyAmyloid (mycology)Neurofibrillary tangleApolipoprotein EDiseaseMedicine
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes