Summarised by Centrist
A new study suggests that receiving the shingles vaccine could lower the risk of developing dementia later in life, with researchers finding a 20 percent reduction among those who were vaccinated.
Published in Nature and based on health records from 280,000 older adults in Wales, the study compared individuals eligible for the zoster vaccine at age 79 to those just slightly older who were not. “Using detailed large-scale electronic health record data, we were able to compare adults who were ineligible for the vaccine because they were born immediately before the eligibility cut-off date with those born immediately after who were eligible,” the authors said, describing the setup as a “natural experiment.”
Seven years after the Welsh vaccination mandate began, researchers found that people who received the shingles vaccine were about 20 percent less likely to develop dementia than those who did not. “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 Stanford researcher Pascal Geldsetzer, highlighting the study’s unique design.
Geldsetzer noted that earlier studies linking vaccines and reduced dementia risk often suffered from selection bias – vaccinated individuals tend to have different health behaviours, but that this natural experiment provided stronger evidence.
