These headlines are horrible. The actual story is about "Amyloid Beta, the substance currently thought to cause Alzheimer's, may actually protect against Alzheimer's and herpes".
>"Robert Moir, a neurologist at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, says that many researchers have cast it as a villainous molecule with no beneficial function. “It’s just bad, bad, bad,” he says. “But it has become increasingly obvious that this isn’t true.” Moir thinks that amyloid beta has a more heroic role, as a foot soldier of our immune system. It protects neurons from infectious microbes—and from herpes viruses, in particular."
>"In the past three decades, more than 100 papers have described correlations between the presence of HSV–1 and the risk of Alzheimer’s... Most recently, Ben Readhead and his colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed that two herpes viruses, HHV–6A and HHV–7, were more common in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients than in those of healthy people."
And the article continues to point out the links, though hedges as to whether it is a causal link or not in either direction.
The presence of a correlation isnt the interesting part of the story (as noted by others, what isnt correlated with Alzheimer's?), so should not be highlighted in the headline. The interesting part is the proposal that amyloid beta is protective.
Frodo: 'It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.'
Gandalf: 'Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.'
TL;DR: One can effectively downvote stories via the "flag". Use it with great care.
I didn't flag the story because it isn't offensive or blatantly inappropriate. I'm not sure you need to warn people off that. But I'm also pretty sure that if this stuff was banished to buzzfeed Hacker News would be much better and buzzfeed would not suffer in finding the audience. I cannot imagine a serious issue with it simply not showing up at all for the same reasons we don't like highly political stories:
Nobody is convincing anybody, and there's not anything you can do about it, it just makes you worry so you read the story. It isn't click bait, but it is something like think bait.
There is pretty good research that shows people who remain engaged in mentally challenging activities past age 65 have a lower rate of Alzheimers. Whether it's playing chess, engaging in some technically complicated hobby like large-scale model trains, studying art history, whatever.
I've seen studies that show a strong parallel between people who are passive media consumers and don't self-identify in surveys as doing anything that exerts themselves mentally, and the rate of alzheimers.
But that sounds like one of those observations where you don't know what's the cause and what's the result.
Alzheimer's starts slowly and can go for quite some time before being diagnosed. But during that time, things like playing chess could already become more difficult and less pleasing so you just don't do that and resort to watching TV.
The studies I've seen were specifically tracking people who've been doing "mentally taxing" activities as part of a long term lifestyle choice, before the typical onset age. As compared to people who self-identified as not doing anything mentally taxing in the last N years.
Well, we could work on a cure and vaccine for HSV-1. Whether or not it mitigates Alzheimer's I sure would pay a lot of money to not deal with cold sores every winter.
There already is an effective therapeutic vaccine. There has been for years. The problem is, it's only done a phase II clinic trial. They need USD$20mm to move through the third phase, and onto mass production. The company is called AuRx. If anyone has twenty million in their pocket, please end herpes for all.
Peter Thiel's investment firm threw USD$7mm at Rational Vaccines last year, but unfortunately as far as I'm aware they are mired in a legal battle since their first human "clinical trial" was performed outside the supervision of the regulators. Rational Vaccines (Prof. William Halford) developed Theravax, a live-attenuated vaccine. It operates on the same principle as the vaccine developed by AuRx, but IIRC, not quite as safely and effectively.
Aside from this, our only (as far as I'm aware) hopes are CRISPR efforts from either Editas or Excision Bio, or an antiviral developed by NanoViricides.
Yeah, there have been many attempts at crowdfunding this stuff. As it turns out, nobody cares that much.
You'd think all the celebrities who buy $100mm mansions could do something about it (since statistically they probably all have it), but no.
If we're lucky, Thiel's investment will turn good. I'm sure his associates aren't morons and they didn't invest in a dud. Last I heard, Rational Vaccines are ramping up to proper human clinic trials within FDA regulations. We just need to wait.
Excision Bio should be running human clinical trials either next year or the following, and our collective understanding of CRISPR is expanding rapidly. So that's something to be excited about. Not that this makes waiting any less painful for sufferers.
wait, hold on. there's an effective drug that cures HHV-1 and alot of other things include the cryptoplasma cat parasite virus, and Herpies 2. There's no toxic limit (people take 4g twice a day with no side effect, way over what is needed to kill it) and it works within 48-72 hours. We don't need a vaccine. It could be sold over the counter. There are two groups that have separate method of actions, so if it fails there's another one.
The current state of care is periodic retroactive therapy in the case of an outbreak, or continuous prophylaxis which isn't completely effective due to lack of bioavailability.
People still get outbreaks during prophylaxis, and people still shed the virus when symptoms aren't present.
if your a doctor I'll send you the name of the drugs. They came out in 2015 and are about $80 each a pill, but you can buy them in India for $.34 each.
This made me realize that future humans will view our understanding of Alzheimer's the way we view people's understanding of AIDS in the 60s. "You mean they were getting Alzheimer's left and right, and they hadn't noticed it was caused/transmitted by X?!"
Assuming there's some preventable cause or vector, anyway.
It might be a long time before we know. The fact is the body / brain is exposed to a lot of chemicals and compounds that have __never__ been verified for safety - either alone or when combined with others.
At this point there are simple too many of these and the combinations even larger.
_If__ such things contribute to anything, we'll likely never know.
Prior to the late 1970s / early 1980s, the stigma associated with homosexuality was much stronger. Being gay, and having multiple sex partners, was something that most gay men would probably not admit to. In many areas it would be admitting to a crime. So in the case histories of early AIDS sufferers, that commonality may not have been clear.
Interesting thought. Btw: there are people who believe this the same with HIV. Pleas note: I’m not endorsing their thoughts in any way, just want to point out the similarity.
However, Clark said a phase III trial would have cost $150 million and taken three years. In the end, the company’s board and investors were “unwilling to take on the investment.”
I had read years ago that all the herpes viruses emit RNA strands into the nucleus upon initial infection and conversion of the cell into a "provirus."
This RNA serves to keep the virus latent and quiet, perhaps for years. Only when this suppressive RNA is washed out of the nucleus does replication begin.
The idea was to remove all of this RNA everywhere in a controlled manner while administering acyclovir or another antiviral. I don't know what inaccessible resovoirs remain for the herpes family. The brain would be particularly hard to reach.
Such a treatment might also trigger shingles, mono, and ks all at once if it was too widely targeted or if the antiviral wasn't strong enough.
It's pretty crazy that Chip Clark would even suggest anyone should spend $150mm on GEN-003 — a subunit vaccine (which the late Prof. Halford explained is unlikely to move the needle on HSV treatment due to lack of antigenic breadth) — instead of spending $20mm on AuRx — a live-attenuated (IIRC) vaccine which has proven more effective than GEN-003 in Phase II trials.
The article mentions that one of the viruses which seems correlated with Alzheimer's from multiple studies is HHV–6A and 99% of people carry that one, but for unknown reasons the viral infection is much more active in people with Alzheimer's symptoms, though the number of ApoE genes is correlated with risk of active viral infection/Alzheimer's per individual.
The problem is, most journalists, who filter / rewrite the study press releases don't understand the difference.
Sometimes, frankly, I'm not so sure some who publish such studies understand the difference; or if they do they don't care and publish anyway for the publicity.
Everything is correlated with everything else. Take that as a first principle and you will see that almost all the "discoveries" you hear about are a waste of time.
alzheimers is probably like cancer. its not useful to talk about 'one cure' when in reality its many diseases. in alzheimer's case, its probably a symptom of many possible things that can go wrong
It seems to be plausible, that by adapting a healthy diet, at least the risk can be lowered and the onset delayed.
But my impression is, that a lot of factors, like poison from the environment (not only food and water, but also through the air) in combination with deseases, allergies and maybe medications etc, come together with genetic preconditions.
Obesity is almost never genetic. There are a tiny handful of genetic conditions for which obesity can emerge as a side effect, but in the vast majority of cases obesity is simply the result of consuming too many calories. [1]
I don't think a source should be necessary for this, though I did bother to include one. Obesity hardly existed in e.g. the fifties, and that was certainly not for a shortage of food. And the individuals of healthy weight did reproduce, in great numbers. The sudden emergence of a massive genetic disorder makes no sense.
On the other hand people started becoming fat once quick, cheap, food that sacrifices healthfulness for flavor and price became ubiquitous. And in contemporary times we've subsidized the pants off corn resulting in things like high fructose corn syrup being in practically everything. And of course it would be remiss to not consider the great changes in the engineering of foodstuffs and the corresponding change in the status quo of herbicides with us also consuming trace amounts in massive quantities, as a generational experiment.
It seems possible that Alzheimer's is not a single disease, but a cluster (or a class) of diseases that have very similar symptoms and effects on neurology. Many causes, one manifestation, like cancer.
This is where biomedical theories go before they die. "Its so complex there cant even be a cure by definition, thats why we failed. It has nothing to do with incorrect usage of statistics, lack of coming up with and testing quantitative theories, and questionable research practices being standard in our field."
All theses studies present many correlations between herpes and Alzheimers. Perhaps Judea Pearl methods and books could be used to develep medical studies. What kind of experiments is expected to have the better result for the minimum cost?
I should like to know if this kind of approach is being used nowadays. Recall that Judea Perl idea is not only to analyze current data but to design experiments to estimate conditional probability with experiment designed to test ideas.
If antiviral drugs were cheap enough and free (or nearly free) of side effects, should we simply start using them daily as we grow older, in parts of the world where we live long enough?
"Acyclovir crosses the blood-brain barrier, a desirable quality for the treatment of herpes encephalitis, neonatal herpes simplex virus infections, and, possibly, multiple sclerosis" [0]
"The bioavailability of orally administered acyclovir is limited to 15 to 30% (23), and the level of passage across the blood-brain barrier has been assumed to be low, probably due to the relatively low lipophilicity of acyclovir (8). It was previously found (14) that upon oral administration the acyclovir concentration in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is only 13 to 52% of that found in plasma. When sustained and high concentrations of acyclovir in plasma are desirable, improved bioavailability can be achieved with valacyclovir, the hydrochloride salt of the l-valyl ester of acyclovir." [1]
The nucleoside analogues currently used to treat HSV aren't super effective, and do sometimes carry harmful side-effects.
We may have a more effective treatment in Pritelivir, if this ever gets through clinical trials. It has a different mechanism than acyclovir et al — it is a helicase primase inhibitor.
It may even be true that HSV is more effectively treated when helicase primase inhibitors and nucleoside analogues work in conjunction.
“We can’t make any causal inferences” from these studies, cautions Maria Carrillo, the chief scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association. “Their findings don’t prove the viruses lead to Alzheimer’s progression, but there is a relationship, and we need to understand what herpes viruses are doing in the brain.”
Also, even if there was a deeper cause contributing to both ("causing it" is much more rare than a common contributing factor) you could cure one bot not the other if you don't address (or don't even know) that common factor but use some other path to address one problem even without knowing the full picture. When (as is common) there are many contributing factors solving one problem may be done by addressing only one or some of them, and that may not be the one that also contributes to some other (visible) problem. So "curing one also cures the other" would only work in an incredibly specific scenario, while there are many others possible that allow some sort of common factor somewhere, among many others.
Actually, I did read the article, and I was talking about this: A second Taiwanese study looked at more than 8,000 people who had been recently diagnosed with HSV–1. Over the next decade, those people were 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia than uninfected peers. But again, that risk fell by 80 percent among those who had been treated with anti-herpes drugs.
These headlines are horrible. The actual story is about "Amyloid Beta, the substance currently thought to cause Alzheimer's, may actually protect against Alzheimer's and herpes".
>"Robert Moir, a neurologist at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, says that many researchers have cast it as a villainous molecule with no beneficial function. “It’s just bad, bad, bad,” he says. “But it has become increasingly obvious that this isn’t true.” Moir thinks that amyloid beta has a more heroic role, as a foot soldier of our immune system. It protects neurons from infectious microbes—and from herpes viruses, in particular."
Further down in the article:
>"In the past three decades, more than 100 papers have described correlations between the presence of HSV–1 and the risk of Alzheimer’s... Most recently, Ben Readhead and his colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed that two herpes viruses, HHV–6A and HHV–7, were more common in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients than in those of healthy people."
And the article continues to point out the links, though hedges as to whether it is a causal link or not in either direction.
The presence of a correlation isnt the interesting part of the story (as noted by others, what isnt correlated with Alzheimer's?), so should not be highlighted in the headline. The interesting part is the proposal that amyloid beta is protective.
There are so many links to Alzheimer's lately that I'm not sure there's a reasonable prevention strategy.
Most nascent lines of research probably shouldn't be used to make life choices anyway.
It's possible this comment should be the top comment on all pop science news reports.
Edit: ideally people could down vote stories. Maybe only at some super high karma?
Frodo: 'It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.'
Gandalf: 'Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.'
TL;DR: One can effectively downvote stories via the "flag". Use it with great care.
I didn't flag the story because it isn't offensive or blatantly inappropriate. I'm not sure you need to warn people off that. But I'm also pretty sure that if this stuff was banished to buzzfeed Hacker News would be much better and buzzfeed would not suffer in finding the audience. I cannot imagine a serious issue with it simply not showing up at all for the same reasons we don't like highly political stories:
Nobody is convincing anybody, and there's not anything you can do about it, it just makes you worry so you read the story. It isn't click bait, but it is something like think bait.
There's no reason for hiding news about nascent lines of research. They are interesting and relevant.
People should just not make life choices based on them.
There is pretty good research that shows people who remain engaged in mentally challenging activities past age 65 have a lower rate of Alzheimers. Whether it's playing chess, engaging in some technically complicated hobby like large-scale model trains, studying art history, whatever.
I've seen studies that show a strong parallel between people who are passive media consumers and don't self-identify in surveys as doing anything that exerts themselves mentally, and the rate of alzheimers.
But that sounds like one of those observations where you don't know what's the cause and what's the result.
Alzheimer's starts slowly and can go for quite some time before being diagnosed. But during that time, things like playing chess could already become more difficult and less pleasing so you just don't do that and resort to watching TV.
The studies I've seen were specifically tracking people who've been doing "mentally taxing" activities as part of a long term lifestyle choice, before the typical onset age. As compared to people who self-identified as not doing anything mentally taxing in the last N years.
67% of all humans carry HSV-1. I don’t think there is much prevention you could do
http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simpl...
Well, we could work on a cure and vaccine for HSV-1. Whether or not it mitigates Alzheimer's I sure would pay a lot of money to not deal with cold sores every winter.
There already is an effective therapeutic vaccine. There has been for years. The problem is, it's only done a phase II clinic trial. They need USD$20mm to move through the third phase, and onto mass production. The company is called AuRx. If anyone has twenty million in their pocket, please end herpes for all.
Peter Thiel's investment firm threw USD$7mm at Rational Vaccines last year, but unfortunately as far as I'm aware they are mired in a legal battle since their first human "clinical trial" was performed outside the supervision of the regulators. Rational Vaccines (Prof. William Halford) developed Theravax, a live-attenuated vaccine. It operates on the same principle as the vaccine developed by AuRx, but IIRC, not quite as safely and effectively.
Aside from this, our only (as far as I'm aware) hopes are CRISPR efforts from either Editas or Excision Bio, or an antiviral developed by NanoViricides.
Have they thought about crowd funding a raise? I'd contribute. Surely they can do something outside of institutional investing.
Yeah, there have been many attempts at crowdfunding this stuff. As it turns out, nobody cares that much.
You'd think all the celebrities who buy $100mm mansions could do something about it (since statistically they probably all have it), but no.
If we're lucky, Thiel's investment will turn good. I'm sure his associates aren't morons and they didn't invest in a dud. Last I heard, Rational Vaccines are ramping up to proper human clinic trials within FDA regulations. We just need to wait.
Excision Bio should be running human clinical trials either next year or the following, and our collective understanding of CRISPR is expanding rapidly. So that's something to be excited about. Not that this makes waiting any less painful for sufferers.
wait, hold on. there's an effective drug that cures HHV-1 and alot of other things include the cryptoplasma cat parasite virus, and Herpies 2. There's no toxic limit (people take 4g twice a day with no side effect, way over what is needed to kill it) and it works within 48-72 hours. We don't need a vaccine. It could be sold over the counter. There are two groups that have separate method of actions, so if it fails there's another one.
This is categorically false.
There is no cure for HSV.
The current state of care is periodic retroactive therapy in the case of an outbreak, or continuous prophylaxis which isn't completely effective due to lack of bioavailability.
People still get outbreaks during prophylaxis, and people still shed the virus when symptoms aren't present.
if your a doctor I'll send you the name of the drugs. They came out in 2015 and are about $80 each a pill, but you can buy them in India for $.34 each.
I am not a doctor, just a relatively informed individual.
I believe the drug you are talking about is Pritelivir/Amenamevir, currently marketed in Japan under the name Amenalief.
Am I correct? If so, I was not aware they are available in India for such a low price.
What we can do is realize that HSV-1 is not the problem.
The fact that some individuals' immune system let it through hint that there is a more important causal issue somewhere.
Herpes may be a simple symptom, not a disease.
And maybe it's a symptom of a condition that is similar to the one that let Alzheimer’s set in.
Who knows, maybe Alzheimer's is a symptom too of a more deep, complex and subtitle disorder.
This made me realize that future humans will view our understanding of Alzheimer's the way we view people's understanding of AIDS in the 60s. "You mean they were getting Alzheimer's left and right, and they hadn't noticed it was caused/transmitted by X?!"
Assuming there's some preventable cause or vector, anyway.
It might be a long time before we know. The fact is the body / brain is exposed to a lot of chemicals and compounds that have __never__ been verified for safety - either alone or when combined with others.
At this point there are simple too many of these and the combinations even larger.
_If__ such things contribute to anything, we'll likely never know.
Nitpick: AIDS wasn’t really noticed at all in the US until the beginning of the 1980s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
Prior to the late 1970s / early 1980s, the stigma associated with homosexuality was much stronger. Being gay, and having multiple sex partners, was something that most gay men would probably not admit to. In many areas it would be admitting to a crime. So in the case histories of early AIDS sufferers, that commonality may not have been clear.
Interesting thought. Btw: there are people who believe this the same with HIV. Pleas note: I’m not endorsing their thoughts in any way, just want to point out the similarity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis
67% of all humans carry HSV-1. I don’t think there is much prevention you could do
Actually, there's quite a lot we can do, and relatively cheaply, too: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-we-still-dont-hav... :
However, Clark said a phase III trial would have cost $150 million and taken three years. In the end, the company’s board and investors were “unwilling to take on the investment.”
"We" are just choosing not to do it.
I had read years ago that all the herpes viruses emit RNA strands into the nucleus upon initial infection and conversion of the cell into a "provirus."
This RNA serves to keep the virus latent and quiet, perhaps for years. Only when this suppressive RNA is washed out of the nucleus does replication begin.
The idea was to remove all of this RNA everywhere in a controlled manner while administering acyclovir or another antiviral. I don't know what inaccessible resovoirs remain for the herpes family. The brain would be particularly hard to reach.
Such a treatment might also trigger shingles, mono, and ks all at once if it was too widely targeted or if the antiviral wasn't strong enough.
It's pretty crazy that Chip Clark would even suggest anyone should spend $150mm on GEN-003 — a subunit vaccine (which the late Prof. Halford explained is unlikely to move the needle on HSV treatment due to lack of antigenic breadth) — instead of spending $20mm on AuRx — a live-attenuated (IIRC) vaccine which has proven more effective than GEN-003 in Phase II trials.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262422871_Antigenic...
The article mentions that one of the viruses which seems correlated with Alzheimer's from multiple studies is HHV–6A and 99% of people carry that one, but for unknown reasons the viral infection is much more active in people with Alzheimer's symptoms, though the number of ApoE genes is correlated with risk of active viral infection/Alzheimer's per individual.
Correlation is not cause.
The problem is, most journalists, who filter / rewrite the study press releases don't understand the difference.
Sometimes, frankly, I'm not so sure some who publish such studies understand the difference; or if they do they don't care and publish anyway for the publicity.
File fake science next to fake news. It's real.
Everything is correlated with everything else. Take that as a first principle and you will see that almost all the "discoveries" you hear about are a waste of time.
alzheimers is probably like cancer. its not useful to talk about 'one cure' when in reality its many diseases. in alzheimer's case, its probably a symptom of many possible things that can go wrong
Apparently the brains of Alzheimers patients are full of plaque similar to arterosclorosis - https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/alzheimers-disease/
Probably for most of us its more important to undertand that genes are not a death sentence, they are triggered by environmental factors.
Obesity is also genetic, some persons body cant cope with the standard western diet.
But if they adapt their diet they will most likely never get obese, and get heart disease and diabetes as a result.
Your thoughts?
The first link I found was this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8327020
It seems to be plausible, that by adapting a healthy diet, at least the risk can be lowered and the onset delayed.
But my impression is, that a lot of factors, like poison from the environment (not only food and water, but also through the air) in combination with deseases, allergies and maybe medications etc, come together with genetic preconditions.
Obesity is almost never genetic. There are a tiny handful of genetic conditions for which obesity can emerge as a side effect, but in the vast majority of cases obesity is simply the result of consuming too many calories. [1]
I don't think a source should be necessary for this, though I did bother to include one. Obesity hardly existed in e.g. the fifties, and that was certainly not for a shortage of food. And the individuals of healthy weight did reproduce, in great numbers. The sudden emergence of a massive genetic disorder makes no sense.
On the other hand people started becoming fat once quick, cheap, food that sacrifices healthfulness for flavor and price became ubiquitous. And in contemporary times we've subsidized the pants off corn resulting in things like high fructose corn syrup being in practically everything. And of course it would be remiss to not consider the great changes in the engineering of foodstuffs and the corresponding change in the status quo of herbicides with us also consuming trace amounts in massive quantities, as a generational experiment.
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/inde...
It seems possible that Alzheimer's is not a single disease, but a cluster (or a class) of diseases that have very similar symptoms and effects on neurology. Many causes, one manifestation, like cancer.
This is where biomedical theories go before they die. "Its so complex there cant even be a cure by definition, thats why we failed. It has nothing to do with incorrect usage of statistics, lack of coming up with and testing quantitative theories, and questionable research practices being standard in our field."
I agree with you, too bad you've been down-voted...
All theses studies present many correlations between herpes and Alzheimers. Perhaps Judea Pearl methods and books could be used to develep medical studies. What kind of experiments is expected to have the better result for the minimum cost? I should like to know if this kind of approach is being used nowadays. Recall that Judea Perl idea is not only to analyze current data but to design experiments to estimate conditional probability with experiment designed to test ideas.
It wasn't clear to me, is amyloid beta role __only__ to protect the brain from herpes?
Or is there a particular reason the study used that particular herpes virus? Is that reason scientific or for press release purposes?
If it is amyloid beta's only job, is that typical?
Without amyloid beta what danger, if any, does this herpes virus pose to an unprotected brain?
Finally, wouldn't this be easy to test / verify in humans? Wouldn't a simple blood test show herpes or herpes antibodies? And then Alzheimer's?
If antiviral drugs were cheap enough and free (or nearly free) of side effects, should we simply start using them daily as we grow older, in parts of the world where we live long enough?
Isn't herpes treatment aciclovir? Cheap and with little side-effects.
It likely doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier.
It also wouldn't touch latent virus, only a minority that were actively replicating.
"Acyclovir crosses the blood-brain barrier, a desirable quality for the treatment of herpes encephalitis, neonatal herpes simplex virus infections, and, possibly, multiple sclerosis" [0]
"The bioavailability of orally administered acyclovir is limited to 15 to 30% (23), and the level of passage across the blood-brain barrier has been assumed to be low, probably due to the relatively low lipophilicity of acyclovir (8). It was previously found (14) that upon oral administration the acyclovir concentration in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is only 13 to 52% of that found in plasma. When sustained and high concentrations of acyclovir in plasma are desirable, improved bioavailability can be achieved with valacyclovir, the hydrochloride salt of the l-valyl ester of acyclovir." [1]
[0] http://aac.asm.org/content/54/3/1146.full
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC166099/
Symptoms are treatable, virus is not.
Cheap, yes. Without significant side-effects, no.
The nucleoside analogues currently used to treat HSV aren't super effective, and do sometimes carry harmful side-effects.
We may have a more effective treatment in Pritelivir, if this ever gets through clinical trials. It has a different mechanism than acyclovir et al — it is a helicase primase inhibitor.
It may even be true that HSV is more effectively treated when helicase primase inhibitors and nucleoside analogues work in conjunction.
Is it not obvious that this article is meant to make us imagine beloved elders as participants in high risk sex?
Please don't do this here.
So curing one disease can also cure another...
No. You didn't read the article.
“We can’t make any causal inferences” from these studies, cautions Maria Carrillo, the chief scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association. “Their findings don’t prove the viruses lead to Alzheimer’s progression, but there is a relationship, and we need to understand what herpes viruses are doing in the brain.”
Also, even if there was a deeper cause contributing to both ("causing it" is much more rare than a common contributing factor) you could cure one bot not the other if you don't address (or don't even know) that common factor but use some other path to address one problem even without knowing the full picture. When (as is common) there are many contributing factors solving one problem may be done by addressing only one or some of them, and that may not be the one that also contributes to some other (visible) problem. So "curing one also cures the other" would only work in an incredibly specific scenario, while there are many others possible that allow some sort of common factor somewhere, among many others.
Actually, I did read the article, and I was talking about this: A second Taiwanese study looked at more than 8,000 people who had been recently diagnosed with HSV–1. Over the next decade, those people were 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia than uninfected peers. But again, that risk fell by 80 percent among those who had been treated with anti-herpes drugs.