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How a childhood virus can contribute to dementia later and what you can do
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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It's chickenpox, which can resurface as shingles in adulthood.
Before there was a vaccine, parents would deliberately expose their kids to chickenpox, reasoning that it would confer long term immunity at an age when an infection was unpleasant but didn't seem very dangerous. (As opposed to in adulthood, when an infection was likely to be a greater danger.) I don't think anyone had linked it to neurological problems yet.
Since then, we have found correlation between the varicella zoster virus and multiple sclerosis, and now apparently dementia. I don't know if it has been proven to be a contributing factor yet, but I think it's pretty clear that getting vaccinated is the right thing to do.
When I was a kid the chicken pox vaccine was still pretty new. I remember hearing parents talking about it, and remember a few of them saying that it was only X% effective (don't remember what that percentage was off the top of my head)
At the time, it seemed like every other children's show had a chicken pox episode with one or more of the characters getting chicken pox, their parents talking about having a chicken pox party to get their kids infected, etc. it kind of seemed like it was almost inevitable that either I'd get chicken pox at some point or a lot of kids I knew would.
But I, and most of the kids I went to school with, did end up getting the vaccine, and very few kids in my school ever ended up with chickenpox. I can probably just about count the number of cases on my fingers in a school with hundreds of kids.
So vaccines work.
Funny story though, at one point in my childhood I got sick and ended up getting a prescription for amoxicillin. I started breaking out in sort of a rash/hives, and for a while they thought it might be chicken pox.
Turns out I'm actually just allergic to amoxicillin.
And then to make things even weirder, my sister gets a similar reaction from the azithromycin I usually got instead.
seems its not even correlation isnt equal causation. shingles can be dangerous if it causes meningitis, or gastrointestinal activation. when i had shingles at 20, although the blisters(now permanent scrs with nerve damage) apparently also traveled to the spine which cause it to stiffin up, it lasted only a week. dint have other meningitis symptoms though. its much more likely if your 50+ though.
I always thought there was a convenience thing too. You knew all your children were going to catch it, so for you want to deal with it just once, or once per kid?