A team of scientists at the University of Colorado is likely to discover that a common disease called shingles, or shingles, can increase a person’s risk of stroke. The new findings reveal how latent viral infections reawaken after years of dormancy and cause health problems beyond the acute stage, according to the New Atlas website, citing the journal Infectious Diseases.
Chicken pox
Most people become infected with the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) in childhood and for some it can lead to a disease known as chicken pox. While most signs of the disease resolve quickly in many people, the virus itself never truly goes away and often lies dormant in the central nervous system.
In about 30% of cases, VZV reactivates at some point in their lives, causing disease again. But when it’s awake and active again, it’s called shingles. For most patients, shingles is a skin rash and can be associated with a number of other health complications.
stroke risk
“Many people are familiar with the painful rash associated with shingles, but may not realize that its complications include the risk of stroke, which increases for a year after infection,” explained lead researcher on the new study, Andrew Popak, noting that the most important point is that “the rash. The skin tissue often heals completely and the patient feels normal while walking and lives at a high risk of stroke.”
The researchers suspected that the increased risk was due to the formation of small sac-like particles called exosomes that form inside cells and carry blood clotting proteins to tissues elsewhere in the body.
Latent symptoms for 3 months
The results revealed that the exosomes in the shingles patients contained significantly higher amounts of clotting proteins than in the healthy subjects. Even more surprising, these levels were still high when samples were taken from patients with shingles three months after their acute illness had subsided.
blood clots
In an article published in The Conversation, Popak explained: ‘To functionally confirm that the content of exosomal particles can induce clotting, platelets – the cell fragments responsible for blood clotting – from healthy subjects were exposed to the exosomes of patients affected by herpes zoster or healthy subjects.” Exposure of platelets to shingles exosomes causes them to clump together and form clumps with other types of blood cells, such as occurs in the formation of a blood clot.”
Flu and COVID-19
An increased risk of stroke has also been linked to the effects of other viral infections, including influenza and COVID-19, but, at this point, research is only focusing on the risk of stroke as it relates to VZV infection, so it is unclear whether this mechanism plays a role in the relationship between stroke and other viral diseases.
Viral infection
According to Popak, much work remains to be done to better understand the relationship between stroke and viral infections, but in the near term these new findings could help inform clinical practice. A vaccine has been approved to prevent shingles in adults over 50, but there are also antiplatelet drugs that can be given to shingles patients who are at increased risk of stroke.
“If these findings are confirmed by a larger longitudinal study, the findings may change clinical practice,” Popak said. … It is really important and its risks can be easily mitigated”, as clinical practice could include the inclusion of mandatory treatment with antiplatelet agents to avoid thrombosis and stroke.
