When you scan the list of factors that raise your risk for Alzheimer’s, the most commonly accepted are age (the greater your age, the greater your risk), sex (women represent over 60% of AD cases), and having had an auto-immune disease (diabetes seems to be a common co-morbidity of AD). But up until now, what you didn’t see, and what dove-tails into our earlier post regarding auto-immunity as a risk factor, is where you live. This post discusses new data that has found that living in an industrialized country – like the US – raises your statistical likelihood of contracting AD by nearly 10 percent. 

In this 2013 age-adjusted study from Cambridge University, “Better Hygiene in Wealthy Nations May Increase Alzheimer’s Risk”, researchers found a 9% higher incidence of Alzheimer’s in affluent countries. They attribute it to the cleaner environments that often accompany affluence. 

Up until reading this study, we’d never heard of the “Hygiene Hypotheses” [HH] and were interested to learn that it’s a widely accepted theory that came into being around 1989. This hypothesis blames increasing sanitized environments that reduce our exposure to bacteria, viruses and micro-organisms, and in so doing, prevent our immune systems from “learning” how to combat these contagions. This deficiency in our natural immune systems is hypothesized to increase the incidence of auto-immune diseases and allergies for many.

This Cambridge’s researchers found that in less-developed, poorer countries – less people are developing AD. They directly attribute this to the constant exposure to dirt, feces and mud of these regions. Seems right? Well, we’re not going to drink the koolaide quite yet. 

So, to add balance, we looked further to see how widely accepted the Hygiene Hypothesis is, and found – at least according to this article – that the HH is “misleading people away from finding the true causes of these rises in allergic disease.” Wow.  That’s a pretty strong position.  The writer goes further to discuss how new epidemiological, experimental and molecular evidence is now pointing to a different hypothesis to explain the rise in auto-immune diseases and life threatening allergies.  This newer hypothesis (christened around 2003) is that that early exposure to a broad range of “good/friendly” microbes (and not the “bad/infectious” bugs which is what the HH is contending) is critical for our immune system to learn how to appropriately react to stimuli. This new hypothesis, coined “The Old Friend’s Hypothesis” [OFH]– says that the idea of cutting back on personal hygiene – which the HH proposes – will NOT have ANY effect on increasing rates of chronic inflammatory disorders and allergies. All it will do is increase the numbers of infections we encounter. This “Old Friends Hypothesis” says that early and continuous exposure to harmless microorganisms [supposed old friends] that have evolved with us is the best way to train our immune system to react appropriately to threats.

Supporters of the Old Friends Hypothesis look at it this way: our immune system is a computer. Starting even before we are born we have software -but no data. We gain data by exposure to good and bad microbes, which helps train our immune system to properly identify threats and to know what microbes it needs to tolerate. A good example that brings this home is when our immune system bumps into an allergen like peanuts and doesn’t realize that it’s harmless and to be tolerated. That sure will make for a horrendous plane ride.

Makes sense to us. In a future post, we will look more closely at the evolutionary process that exposes our immune system to the wide varieties of necessary microbes – and where this critical process can, and is, interrupted. Hint: check out the time frame where infant formula was introduced and mass promoted here in the U.S. … you’ll find that it was exactly when our current AD patients in Memory Care were being bottle fed this archaic substance that contained absolutely NO “OLD FRIENDS” from their moms through breast milk.  Now that story will be interesting…

These interruptions could likely be another clue into Alzheimer’s Disease. More on that soon. 

• Better hygiene in wealthy nations may increase Alzheimer’s risk 2013; https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/better-hygiene-in-wealthy-nations-may-increase-alzheimers-risk
• Cleaning up the hygiene hypothesis 2017; https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114

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