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,”...
RDN wrote the following post Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:51:43 -0800 A new study that takes advantage of a change in availability of the shingles (*Herpes zoster*) vaccine in Wales finds that vaccination reduces dementia symptoms in those already diagnosed with the disease, and reduced deaths from dementia by approximately 30% over the following nine years.
Summary: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/shingles-vaccine-dementia
Original paper: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01256-5?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425012565%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
#Science #Health #Dementia #Alzheimers #Shingles #HerpesZoster
