According to new research, individuals who received an influenza vaccine had a 40% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease compared to those who were not vaccinated over a four-year period.
The study, led by Prof. PhD. Avram S. Bukhbinder of McGovern Medical School, and co-author Paul E. Schulz, a senior expert in Neurology at McGovern Medical School, compared the risk of Alzheimer's disease between patients who received the influenza vaccine and those who did not. The study results revealed that influenza vaccination in older adults reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease over several years. The strength of this protective effect increases with the number of years an individual receives an annual influenza vaccine—in other words, the incidence of Alzheimer's disease was lowest among those who consistently received the annual influenza vaccine.
Future research will evaluate whether influenza vaccination is associated with the rate of symptom progression in patients already diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia.
The study was conducted two years after scientists identified a link between the influenza vaccine and a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease. They analyzed a larger sample than previous studies, including 935,887 patients who had received the influenza vaccine and 935,887 patients who had not.
During four-year follow-up appointments, 8.5% of the non-vaccinated patients developed Alzheimer's disease during the observation period.
Annual influenza vaccination helps reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease
According to the researchers, these findings underscore the robust protective effect of the influenza vaccine against Alzheimer's disease. Hypotheses regarding the mechanism of action are based on the structural similarity between the influenza virus hemagglutinin and the AB-42 protein that causes Alzheimer's disease, as well as the mitigation of secondary neuronal damage following influenza infection.
According to statistics from The World Alzheimer Report 2019, there were 3 new cases of dementia every second, with currently over 50 million people suffering from dementia, of which approximately 60% have Alzheimer's disease. The prevalence of Alzheimer's disease increases with age, from approximately 5% in individuals under 75 to 40-50% in those over 85. The Vietnamese population is trending towards an aging demographic, with the average life expectancy in Vietnam in 2019 being 73.6 years. Previous studies have identified a reduced risk of dementia associated with the use of adult vaccines such as influenza, diphtheria-tetanus, and pneumococcal vaccines.
Source: Health and Life Newspaper (Báo SKĐS)