When I was a first year medical student my aunt died of probable acute herpes simplex encephalitis at Columbia University Hospital in New York City. That was 55 years ago and her daughters (teenagers at the time) still bear the scars. Later, as a neurologist I treated it, and after 1977, when acyclovir, which effectively treats herpes encephalitis came out, I would always wonder if acyclovir would have saved her.
The drug is simplicity itself. It’s just guanosine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanosine) with two of the carbons of the ribose missing. Herpesviruses have an enzyme which forms the triphosphate incorporating it into its DNA killing the virus. Well, actually we have the same enzyme, but the virus’s enzyme is 3,000,000 times more efficient than ours, so acyclovir is relatively nontoxic to us. People with compromised renal function shouldn’t take it.
What does this have to do with Alzheimer’s disease? The senile plaque of Alzheimers is mostly the aBeta peptide (39 – 43 amino acids) from the amyloid precursor protein (APP). This has been known for years, and my notes on various papers about over the years contain 150,000 characters or so.
Even so, there’s a lot we don’t understand about APP and the abeta peptide — e.g. what are they doing for us? You can knockout the APP gene in mice and they appear normal and fertile. The paper cited below notes that APP has been present in various species for the past 400,000,000 years of evolutionary time remaining pretty much unchanged throughout, so it is probably doing something useful
A recent paper in Neuron (vol. 99 pp. 56 – 63 ’18) noted that aBeta is actually an antimicrobial peptide. When exposed to herpes simplex it binds to glycoproteins on its surface and then oligomerizes forming amyloid (just like in the senile plaque) trapping the virus. Abeta will protect mice against herpes simplex 1 (HSV1) encephalitis. Even more important — infection of the mice with HSV1 induced abeta production in their brains.
People have been claiming infections as the cause of just about every neurodegeneration since I’ve been a neurologist, and papers have been written about HSV1 and Alzheimer’s.
Which brings me to the second paper (ibid. pp. 64 – 82) that looked for the viral RNAs and DNAs in over 900 or so brains, some with and some without Alzheimer’s. They didn’t find HSV but they found two other herpes viruses known to infect man (HHV6, HHV7 — which cause roseola infantum). Humans are subject to infection with 8 different herpes virus (Epstein Barr — mononucleosis, H. Zoster — chickenpox etc. etc.). Just about everyone of us has herpes virus in latent form in the trigeminal ganglion — which gets sensory information from our faces.
So could some sort of indolent herpesvirus infection be triggering abeta peptide production as a defense with the senile plaque as a byproduct? That being the case, given the minimal benefits of any therapy we have for Alzheimer’s disease so far, why not try acyclovir (Zovirax) on Alzheimer’s.
I find it remarkable that neither paper mentioned this possibility, or even discussed any of the antivirals active against herpesviruses.
Chemiotics II 