doesn’t prove a cause, although compounds
from HRT have been seen in brain plaques
that are common in Alzheimer’s patients.
BMJ 2019; 364: 1665Third of measles cases a
reaction to the MMR
More than 30 percent of cases of measles
contributing to the ‘epidemic’ that has
sparked the clamp-down on anti-vaxxers are
nothing more than reactions to the vaccine.
Seventy-three of the 194 measles cases
recorded in the United States in 2015—the
year an outbreak at Disneyland sparked the
kick-back against the anti-vax movement—
were merely reactions to the MMR (measles-
mumps-rubella) vaccine.
Although the data has never been
published, it was reported by scientists from
the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) to support recent research
on faster methods to differentiate vaccine
reactions from real cases of measles.
It had been assumed that around 5 percent
of vaccinated children will display
measles-like symptoms, such as
rash or fever, but the new data
suggests this reaction may be
more common.If that’s the case, more than a hundred of
the 350 cases reported so far this year in the
US could also be vaccine reactions.
Unvaccinated children have been blamed
for the rise in measles cases, and health
authorities fear the cherished herd immunity
effect—where 95 percent of a population is
vaccinated—isn’t being achieved because
of the anti-vaccine stories on social media.
Several states in the US are considering a
restriction on exemptions against vaccination.
CDC researchers, working alongside
scientists from the Public Health Agency in
Canada, have been testing two new systems
that can accurately assess whether a case of
measles is caused by the virus or is a reaction
to the vaccine.
Measles outbreaks in Alberta and British
Columbia in Canada were two other instances
when an accurate monitoring system could
have quickly assessed whether they were
cases of ‘real’ measles.
J Clin Microbiol, 2017; 55: 735–Why Lyme patients still suffer
after ‘cure’
Antibiotics aren’t always a complete cure-all
for Lyme disease, as WDDTY investigated in a
Special Report last month.
Around 10 percent of people go
on to suffer chronic and
even life-destroying
fatigue and ‘brain
fog,’ and researchers
have discovered that
inflammation in the brain may
be the cause.
These symptoms, known as post-
treatment Lyme disease syndrome
or PTLDS, can last for years after thepatient has completed ‘successful’ high-dose
antibiotic therapy.
It’s been believed the drugs can reverse
Lyme disease if it can be treated within the
first month or so.
But researchers from Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine have used brain
scans to discover that the debilitating fatigue,
pain, insomnia and ‘brain fog’ experienced by
so many Lyme patients long after treatment is
associated with inflammation in the brain.
The sufferers, who had been diagnosed
with PTLDS, had high levels of a protein
that indicated widespread brain
inflammation.
Although researchers knew that
PTLDS sufferers had chronic inflammation,
they didn’t know it occurred in the brain.
The Johns Hopkins researchers used
sophisticated PET (positron emission
tomography) technology to see for
the very first time just where the
inflammation was happening.
They compared the scans of 12 PTLDS
patients against those from 19 healthy
controls and found that the patients had
signs of inflammation in eight regions of
the brain.
Their discovery proves that PLTDS
fatigue and cognitive problems have a
real biological cause and aren’t just
‘all in the mind,’ as some doctors
have believed, although it doesn’t
explain other symptoms of PLTDS,
such as muscle weakness, the
researchers added.
Lyme disease is a bacterial infection
caused by tick bites. Around 300,
Americans are diagnosed with the condition
every year.
J Neuroinflammation, 2018; 15: 346FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZ ISSUE 01 | AUG/SEP 2019 | WDDTY 15
UPFRONTLack of sleep causes artery disease
A lack of sleep seems to have
more to do with hardening of
the arteries (atherosclerosis)—
one major feature of
cardiovascular disease—than
eating a fatty diet.
Not getting enough sleep
on a regular basis can cause
a buildup of plaque in the
arteries, which causes them to
stiffen and eventually close.
The standard theory of heart
disease states that fatty foods
cause the arteries to ‘clog up’
and narrow, but it has moreto do with a “neuro-immune
axis” linking sleep to the
cardiovascular system, say
researchers at Massachusetts
General Hospital.
Sleep helps to regulate the
production of inflammatory
cells and maintain healthy
blood vessels, and so it would
follow that the lack of sleep has
the reverse effect.
The researchers
demonstrated the effect on
a group of laboratory mice.
Although the cholesterollevels of the sleep-deprived
mice remained the same,
they developed larger arterial
plaques and had double the
number of inflammatory
cells known to contribute to
atherosclerosis.
Hypocretin, a hormone that
helps regulate sleep, also helps
control production of white
blood cells, the researchers
discovered.
Nature, 2019; 566: 383–