shingles rash
Shingles rash; Credit: Getty Images
Older adults who were vaccinated against shingles were 20% less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years compared with people who didn’t receive the shot, a study shows. The report was published Wednesday in Nature.
On Sept. 1, 2013, Wales in the United Kingdom launched a vaccine program that let anyone who turned 79 that day receive the vaccine for one year — but not those over 80.
In all, the team assessed records from more than 280,000 older adults who were 71 to 88 years old and did not have dementia when the vaccine program started. Over a seven-year span, they compared outcomes in people who received the vaccine and those who didn’t. About half of the population who were eligible received the vaccine.
The vaccine lowered the occurrence of shingles during the study period by about 37% in those who were vaccinated. By 2020, 1 in 8 older adults eligible for the program had been diagnosed with dementia. The older adults who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia than people who did not receive the vaccine.
“What makes the study so powerful is that it’s essentially like a randomized trial with a control group — those a little bit too old to be eligible for the vaccine — and an intervention group — those just young enough to be eligible,” Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and senior author of the study, said in a statement.
The link doesn’t show that receiving the shingles vaccine prevents dementia; at this time, it shows a correlation.
The team also noted that protection against dementia was more significant in women than in men, which could be due to sex-based differences in immune response or in the way dementia develops, said Geldsetzer, who would like to conduct a randomized control trial for more evidence.
Authors said the findings give credit to a theory that viruses affecting the nervous system can raise the risk for dementia. Shingles is a viral infection — the same that causes chicken pox — that leads to a painful rash.