It is often chided in public and can get you in trouble for not following proper public etiquette. Nose picking is not just frowned upon but can also cause you serious medical trouble. According to a study, this gross but seemingly harmless habit can lead to health consequences with researchers claiming an increase in your risk of degenerative brain diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Dementia is a general term for a group of diseases that lead to a decline in cognitive abilities, making it difficult to perform daily activities, and is characterized by problems with thinking, memory, behavior, and motor control.

According to a study published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, nose digging allows bacteria, viruses, and fungi to enter the brain, where it can cause inflammation. As we age, inflammation leads to infections which damages brain cells and results in the symptoms of the condition.

Researchers have linked this habit and the unwanted outcome after citing at least ten studies. "Several pathogens, including those that invade the brain via the nasal epithelium, have been linked to Alzheimer's disease and have been isolated during post-mortem analysis,” they wrote.

"In conclusion, these studies show that nose-picking is a significant risk factor and has a part in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. We propose more investigation to understand the association of nose picking with Alzheimer's disease in the form of case-control studies with larger sample populations."

Previously, a detailed study conducted by an Australian research team, whose work was published in the journal Biomolecules, had said that dementia is responsible for memory loss and cognitive decline, caused by "many possible factors".

Both Alzheimer’s and dementia are caused due to an abnormal build-up of proteins – amyloid protein and tau protein in your brain, which lead to the death of brain cells. Experts say the human brain contains over 100 billion nerve cells and other cells that work together to fulfill all the communications needed to perform functions such as thinking, learning, remembering, and planning.

Scientists believe that when amyloid protein builds up in your brain cells, it forms big masses called plaques, blocking communication between nerve cells, which prevents them from carrying out their processes. This slow and ongoing death of the nerve cells results in the symptoms of the conditions

"More recent evidence suggests that neuroinflammation may also play an at least partial role in the development of the disease," the scientists said. "Emerging research has explored the possible involvement of external, invading pathogens in starting or accelerating the neuroinflammatory processes in Alzheimer's disease," they added.

According to experts, pathogens enter your brain and attack the olfactory system - nasal cavity and nerve cells involved in smelling, making it a plausible route, which is also linked to neuroinflammation including herpes, COVID-19, pneumonia, and bronchitis.

Reflecting on the review's results, researchers suggested paying extra attention to hand washing as a potential way to dodge the disease. "Among all the entry routes, the improvement of hand hygiene might be an easy prevention step, as learned from the COVID-19 epidemic," they said.

"One of the lessons learned from Covid-19 is the value of hand hygiene through frequent hand washing and the use of hand sanitizers, and we suggest these routine hygienic procedures be mandatory routine procedures for the incurable nose-picker."

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