Shingles Vaccine Lowers Risk of Dementia...Women are more effective
Apr 03, 2025
|
According to a study by a team of Stanford University professor Pascal Geldsetzer published in the scientific journal Nature on the 2nd (local time), a seven-year follow-up study of the risk of developing dementia in the elderly and unvaccinated people showed that vaccination with the shingles vaccine lowered the risk of developing dementia by 20%.
Shingles, a viral infection that causes a rash accompanied by pain, is caused by a varicella-zoster virus. The chickenpox virus, which was suffered as a child, lurks in nerve cells and is reactivated when the immune system weakens, causing shingles.
The research team noted that the shingles antivirus program conducted in 2013 in Wales, England, created a 'natural clinical experiment' environment that could exclude other factors and investigate the effects of vaccines on dementia. The shingles antivirus program, which began on September 1, 2013, allowed anyone aged 79 at the time to be vaccinated for one year. Seventy-eight-year-olds were eligible for inoculation for one year from the following year, but those who turned 80 could not be eligible for inoculation. As a result, a randomized controlled clinical trial situation was created in which 282,541 people participated, with all other factors being the same and only a few weeks different in birth time.
The research team compared the health of the vaccinated and non-vaccinated groups for 7 years after vaccination and found that the incidence of shingles in the inoculated group decreased by 37%.
By 2020, one in eight elderly people aged 86 and 87 were diagnosed with dementia, and those vaccinated with shingles were 20% less likely to develop dementia than those who were not vaccinated. In addition, the effect of preventing dementia was greater in women than in men.
The research team said the results of the study suggest that vaccines can be a cost-effective strategy to prevent or delay dementia, and further research is needed to reveal the exact causal relationship and mechanism.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
