Shingles vaccine may protect against dementia, new research suggests

Getting vaccinated against shingles may not only lower risk for the condition — it may offer some protection against dementia, a new study suggests.

Getting vaccinated against shingles — a painful and debilitating condition that can flare up years after infection from varicella zoster — not only lowers the risk of developing the rash, but may also offer some protection against dementia, a provocative new study suggests.

The new research, published Wednesday in Nature, analyzed data from more than 280,000 older adults in Wales and found that people who received the original shingles live virus vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia of any type than those who were not vaccinated.

Previous research has found an association between the Shingrix shingles vaccine, which replaced the live virus version in 2020, and a lower risk of dementia, especially in women. But that link wasn't considered as strong because that study design couldn’t account for potential differences between those who were vaccinated and those who were not, such as the possibility that the vaccinated people might have been healthier overall. Shingrex, which targets a tiny bit of viral DNA, turned out to have a longer lasting effect than the original vaccine.

The new study was possible because of an unusual public health policy in Wales that provided a “natural experiment” to explore the potential impact of the vaccine on dementia risk. With the rollout of the vaccine on Sept. 1, 2013, in Wales, shots were offered to people who were 79 on that date but not given to people who had turned 80.

That allowed the German and Stanford University researchers to compare two groups of people with similar health characteristics who differed only by one week in age, making them essentially the same except that the vaccine was available to the younger population but not the older, said Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University and senior author of the study.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/shingles-vaccine-dementia-risk-older-adults-rcna198952

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