The study, signed by scientists from the American UTHealth Houstoncompared the risk of disease incidence between people with and without previous vaccination of the gripe in nearly two million people age 65 and older over the course of four years.
The flu vaccine reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s
According to the results, the flu vaccination in older adults “reduces the risk” of developing Alzheimer’s for several years, and that protective effect increased with the number of years a person received an annual vaccine, one of the signatories, Avram Bukhbinder, said in a statement.
The investigator felt that future research should assess whether this vaccine is also associated with progression rate of symptoms in patients who already have Alzheimer’s dementia.
Previous investigations with vaccines such as tetanus, herpes and polio
Previous studies have found a decreased risk of dementia associated with the previous exposure to multiple vaccines in adulthood, such as tetanusthe poliomyelitis and the herpesin addition to the flu vaccine and others.
The study, which has been approved for publication in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, analyzed two groups, each made up of 935.887 personas, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not.
5% of the vaccinated developed Alzheimer’s, while among the unvaccinated 8.5% developed it
The participants had four year follow-up and in the control appointments it was seen that around 5.1% of vaccinated patients against the flu had developed Alzheimer’s disease, against a 8.5% of the unvaccinated.
These results, according to the team, “reveal the strong protective effect of the influenza vaccine against Alzheimer’s disease. However, the mechanisms underlying this process require further study.”
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