Certainly seems like an interesting avenue, though I don't know enough to speculate as to whether there are surface epitopes (i dont even know how / where on the LDL the virus binds haha)
The relationship btw HSV, APOE, amyloid beta and AD is certainly intriguing but it seems quite messy at this point. Would imagine there's a lot of work to do to unravel the mechanism before we get to the point where we can think about how best to drug whatever target emerges. Unfortunately mouse models in AD are terrible, so studying the biology may be very tough, although it seems iPSC derived neurons are proving to be decent models.
One thing I like about a lot of HN discussions, as opposed to those on many other sites on the web, is that the people involved have a clear sense of what they do and don't know.
> the people involved have a clear sense of what they do and don't know.
As someone who has, on more than one occasion, called out top-posts that were flat-out wrong, but conformed to HN's biases (I was 100% certain of this because the posts concerned either my area of expertise or my first-hand experiences) - I will disagree with you. The occasions made me wonder about the other HN posts where I'm not an expert.
HN isn't anywhere near as free of the usual human love of gossip, valuing social pecking order over objective facts, etc as it imagines itself to be.
But it's a little like that saying about democracy being "the worst thing ever -- except for everything else". In spite of HNs serious delusions about how objective etc it is, it still remains vastly more objective, rational etc than anything else I've found.
The relationship btw HSV, APOE, amyloid beta and AD is certainly intriguing but it seems quite messy at this point. Would imagine there's a lot of work to do to unravel the mechanism before we get to the point where we can think about how best to drug whatever target emerges. Unfortunately mouse models in AD are terrible, so studying the biology may be very tough, although it seems iPSC derived neurons are proving to be decent models.