A shingles vaccine could reduce your risk of dementia by 20 per cent or slow the progression of the disease once you’ve got it, according to recent research led by Stanford University, in the US.
If these findings can be backed up in future research, the vaccine – which is already available – could be used to help prevent and treat dementia: an incurable disease that affects an estimated 57 million people globally.
In a study published in Nature, the scientists analysed the health records of more than 280,000 adults in Wales between the ages of 71 and 88 years old. They were aiming to understand the effects of a shingles vaccination programme that began in 2013.
They found that older adults (aged 79–80) who had received the shingles vaccine were 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia by 2020, compared to those who hadn’t been eligible to receive it.
Senior author Dr Pascal Geldsetzer, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, said this was “a really striking finding,” adding: “This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data.”
What’s more, in a recent follow-up study published in Cell, the same scientists discovered that the shingles vaccine seemed to have a protective effect even among those who’d already been diagnosed with dementia by 2013.
Of the 7,049 Welsh adults included in the study who had dementia, nearly half had died within the following nine years. But among those who had received the shingles vaccine, only 30 per cent had died.
“The most exciting part is that this really suggests that the shingles vaccine doesn’t have only preventive, delaying benefits for dementia, but also therapeutic potential for those who already have dementia,” said Geldsetzer.
Previous studies have already pointed to a potential link between the shingles vaccine and dementia protection, but all of them were weakened by the fact that those who get vaccinated tend to also lead healthier lives in general (so their protection from dementia may have come from elsewhere).
But in this study, that bias wasn’t such a problem. That’s because the vaccination programme was only eligible to a specific group of people: those who were 79 years old on 1 September 2013.
“We know that if you take a thousand people at random born in one week, and a thousand people at random born a week later, there shouldn’t be anything different about them on average,” said Geldsetzer. “They are similar to each other apart from this tiny difference in age.”
In other words: the scientists could directly compare two groups, with the same average mixture of more health-conscious and less health-conscious people, born only a week apart. The only difference between them was their eligibility for this vaccine – making its efficacy against dementia much easier to spot.
Shingles is an infection caused by the Varicella zoster virus – the bug to blame for chickenpox. Its symptoms include a painful rash, burning or tingling feelings, headaches, fever and fatigue.
The virus affects the nervous system, but scientists aren’t yet sure exactly how a shingles vaccine might protect the brain from cognitive decline.
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