Shingles Vaccine

“Can I ask you a question? It's going to be a very controversial one, but there are people arguing, there are very smart people, I should say, arguing that the shingles vaccine is lowering rates of dementia significantly.”

“A, that the shingles vaccine decreases dementia risk, you have to have a clinical trial that's adequately powered to show that. And there is a trial like that being planned currently.”

“Became eligible to get the shingles vaccine. Whereas if they were born one day earlier, they weren't eligible. So you get what you call like a natural experiment where from one day to the next, those people shouldn't be that different otherwise.”

“Well, there was a big shift in the uptake of the shingles vaccine. And so what they can essentially consistently. Showed across all those different populations was that those who got the shingles vaccine or were eligible to have the shingles vaccine, depending on whether they had access to the data on whether the people got it or not had a decreased risk of dementia.”

“And that was consistently seen across those three groups. All those three trials used an older version of the shingles vaccine called Zostavax, which was a live attenuated vaccine. There's now a newer version called Shingrix, which is a recombinant vaccine.”

“But there's a number of reasons why this might be the case. One, obviously. We know it reduces cases of shingles. Shingles can be very painful. It can, you know, can change how people interact with the world. You stay at home. You don't feel good.”

“But it doesn't map onto the dementia risk age that was seen in, seen in these studies. A final piece of this that I think is important and kind of goes beyond just the shingles vaccine is that if you want to maintain function over long periods of time, one of the best things you can do is minimize your, your chances of getting really sick.”

“stronger for the management of varicella zoster through the use of a shingles vaccine in individuals who have been previously infected, which of course, at this point, by the time you're 50, is virtually everybody.”