A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia - Nature Using a natural experiment that avoids common bias concerns, this study finds that the live-attenuated shingles vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis within a follow-up period of...

The vaccine against Shingles helps protect against dementia, results of a natural experiment, adding to prior evidence
"implications are profound"
New @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks John!

Thanks Joanna!

Thanks Juan! We haven’t analysed chemotaxis but based on Charnaux et al, 2005 (FASEB J), I would expect that SDC4ko has some effect on B cell migration towards CXCL12 and SDC1 was suggested to influence CXCL13. But the ko mice don’t have much phenotype; maybe due to redundancy among proteoglycans?

- SDC4 is expressed on naive B cells but absent on germinal center B cells and most memory B cells
- SDC4 deletion increases B cell activation
- low dose soluble heparin (a glycosaminoglycan) limits antigen-mediated activation-induced cell death while high dose heparin acts as B cell mitogen.

Our data suggest
- SDCs influence IL7-mediated B-cell development (in line with PMID 9864155)
- CD138 expression by B cells (also found in anergy PMID 27830696) indicates recent antigen encounter
- while CD138 provides a survival advantage to PC (PMID 28381397) it does not influence PC formation

As a first Bluesky post, I’m happy to share our latest publication @emboreports.org:
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
Led by Craig McKenzie, we used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to investigate how Syndecan-1 (CD138) and -4 (SDC4) influence B-cell development and activation.
#ImmunoSky #MonashUni