Parkinson’s Disease and the Flu

Posted on Friday, October 25, 2013 by Simon Cooke

Here’s a reason you might not have thought of to get your flu shot this year – it might protect you from getting Parkinson’s Disease.

I've been saying since about 2007 that most late-life diseases can be pinned down on specific combinations of genetic susceptibility + external factors (in most cases, viruses). One of these was Parkinson's disease, which looked like it was caused by Influenza.

Well, I missed it at the time, but this study came out in 2011: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105060/

Next prediction: A surprisingly large number of cases of dental caries are caused by human herpes viruses 1 through 4. I expect this one to be confirmed some time around 2018.

Simon Cooke is an occasional video game developer, ex-freelance journalist, screenwriter, film-maker, musician, and software engineer in Seattle, WA.

The views posted on this blog are his and his alone, and have no relation to anything he's working on, his employer, or anything else and are not an official statement of any kind by them (and barely even one by him most of the time).