Get the f lu jab... it could help reduce risk of Alzheimer’s
IRISH experts are hopeful that a new-found link between the flu vaccine and a 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease will encourage more patients to get the jab this winter.
The connection was discovered during a recent study from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, which analysed data from two million patients.
Dr Seán Kennelly, clinical associate professor of medical gerontology at Trinity College Dublin, said the evidence of the link between the vaccine and reduced risk of the disease is strong, but the message is ‘just not out there’.
‘Over the age of 65, everybody should be getting the flu vaccine every single year and the benefits go beyond just reducing your risk of respiratory illness,’ he told RTÉ.
‘The benefit is very clearly associated with reducing your risk of developing dementia and, in particular, Alzheimer’s disease. This was a really strong study that kind of rubber-stamped these signals that we’d seen in multiple smaller studies.’
Irish doctors are hopeful this will encourage more people to get the vaccine, amid ‘very sobering’ projections of hospital overcrowding across the country this winter.
Anthony Staines, professor of health systems at Dublin City University, told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘We’ve seen what the hospitals have been like over the summer. It hasn’t been good.
‘We know that a bad flu season really puts terrible pressure on particularly hospitals, but the whole health service.’
He added: ‘No one really knows what a bad flu and Covid would do, but no one particularly wants to find out either. One of the things we can do to reduce both of those is get vaccinated.’
The HSE draft winter plan states that over the six months of the winter season, a high flu season could see 4,350 hospitalisations, with 225 patients in ICU.
It comes as Health Minister Stephen Donnelly voiced concerns that the nation is ‘potentially looking at a perfect storm’ due to a combination of respiratory syncytial virus and another Covid wave.
Australia saw flu rates ‘several times higher than the average they’ve had over the last number of years’, Mr Donnelly said yesterday.
‘What that would mean for us is a lot more people in hospital, and unfortunately as well, a lot of people die whenever there’s a severe flu season,’ he added.
‘Looking at a perfect storm’