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  • With Mayo Clinic health education outreach coordinator

    Angela Lunde

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Mayo Clinic Health Manager

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  • Alzheimer's blog

  • Dec. 20, 2008

    No link between Alzheimer's and flu shots

    By Angela Lunde

25 comments posted

A few of you have asked about the relationship between the flu vaccine and increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. I went to my colleagues in the Department of Behavioral Neurology for some help with this question, and Brad Boeve, M.D., suggested sharing the following:

There is absolutely no evidence that flu vaccines contribute in any way to Alzheimer's disease, and it is hard to imagine a mechanism of how this could affect amyloid or tau. One blogger referred to excitotoxicity, but this idea came from a non-physician making wild claims and selling a book for profit.

Consider also that thousands of healthy people die from the flu each year, and the vaccines clearly reduce the potential of developing the flu, and lessen the severity of the flu if you still get it.  The public must balance what is proven and could keep them from getting very ill or dying as opposed to an unfounded theory by a layperson.

If this theory keeps one person from getting the vaccine, and then he or she becomes very ill or dies from the flu, those who write or support such claims have contributed to that person's illness or death.

25 comments posted

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Dec. 20, 2008

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