Shingles Vaccine May Reduce Risk of Dementia, Too

If you’re 50 or older and haven’t gotten your shingles vaccine yet, here is an excellent incentive: it could reduce or delay your risk of developing dementia, a new study shows.

Understanding Shingles and Its Vaccines

If you get shingles, lines of pain will shoot through parts of your body — maybe your back, side or even on your face and into your eyes. Shingles looks like a rash yet it’s a nerve issue, so the intensity can be sharp until the virus calms down. In extreme cases, shingles can even cause blindness. The issue usually goes away and stays away, often with the help of antiviral medications, but you can get it again. In rare cases it can morph into postherpetic neuralgia; then you’ll have pain for longer.

You’re most likely to get shingles if you’ve had chicken pox, which many older Americans had as children; many kids are immunized against it today. The virus can tuck itself away in your nerves, then re-emerge decades later in this new form.

For years, Americans 60 and older were advised to take a live vaccine called zoster vaccine live. Since 2017, everyone 50 and up has been told to receive two doses of a non-live alternative called the varicella zoster vaccine. It’s safer for more people, especially those who are immunocompromised, and it lasts longer.

The Shingles-Dementia Connection

Initially, nobody set out to test a connection between any shingles vaccine and dementia. Happenstance brought science to that intersection.

In Wales, back in 2013, doctors had to limit who received the original shingles vaccine, so the powers that be set the line at September 2, 1933. If you were born before then, you couldn’t receive the live vaccine. If you were born the day after, you could. And, so nearly half of those in the younger category received their first injections.

This was no official randomized clinical trial, yet the comparison of two nearly identical groups happens to be as close as you can get to one.

Seven years later, researchers started examining data about the two groups. They learned that those who received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to have developed dementia, mostly Alzheimer’s.

Encouraged by these results, medical teams around the world began additional studies to learn more. One reason is to include people of more diverse ethnicities, since Wales’ residents are mostly Caucasian. The Wales population were in their 70s, while now people get the vaccine in their 50s. Another factor is that patients now receive the non-live vaccine instead.

How the Shingles Vaccine Might Delay Dementia

Now that scientists know that the shingles might delay the onset of dementia for at least seven years, they’re trying to understand the reasons. They’ve found a few theories, which might or might not work with one another:

• Inflammation. Just as inflammation is part of so many medical conditions, it is related to both shingles and dementia. So, if your body’s neuroinflammation goes down — where your brain, spinal cord and other central nervous system elements flare up — both issues are less likely to percolate.
• Hiding. If those nerves are protected, and the shingles virus resides unannounced inside your nerves, it may be less likely to emerge and ultimately affect the brain that controls your nerves.
• Immunity. The shingles vaccine might ramp up your immune system to fight off the shingles infection. That, in turn, might protect you from both shingles and dementia. In fact, the vaccine seems to help women more often than men, and females in general have stronger reactions to antibodies than males do.

Another study revealed that when people who took the new shingles vaccine did develop dementia, that happened more than 160 days later than if they had the old shingles vaccine. It seems that both shingles vaccines help delay the onset of dementia.

If you’re over 50, you should get the shingles vaccine. It will help prevent you from getting a shingles outbreak if you become infected and might, in turn, give you a longer time to live dementia-free.