{"id":244831,"date":"2026-10-02T17:04:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T22:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/common-viral-infections-may-accelerate-als"},"modified":"2026-10-02T17:04:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T22:04:47","slug":"common-viral-infections-may-accelerate-als","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/common-viral-infections-may-accelerate-als","title":{"rendered":"Common Viral Infections May Accelerate ALS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/common-viral-infections-may-accelerate-als.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cA lot of the previous work in this area has been epidemiological in nature, without much focus on the molecular mechanisms that actually underpin the connection between infections and ALS,\u201d says Ahmed, who co-first authored the new paper with Miller Lab alumni Art Marzok and Jonathan Mapletoft. \u201cWhat makes our study unique is that we did take a mechanistic approach \u2014 we explored why this connection might exist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What the researchers found was that even common respiratory viruses that do not infect neurons can leave lasting changes to the nervous system.<\/p>\n<p>In their animal models, Miller\u2019s team observed that COVID-19 and flu infections triggered an inflammatory response from immune cells in the nervous system \u2014 a process called gliosis \u2014 that remained elevated in the spinal cord even after the virus had been cleared from the body. Gliosis, Ahmed notes, is already known to play an important role in ALS, but the findings suggest that an infection may amplify this process, helping to accelerate the disease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cA lot of the previous work in this area has been epidemiological in nature, without much focus on the molecular mechanisms that actually underpin the connection between infections and ALS,\u201d says Ahmed, who co-first authored the new paper with Miller Lab alumni Art Marzok and Jonathan Mapletoft. \u201cWhat makes our study unique is that we [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}