Getting the shingles vaccine might help lower your risk of getting dementia later on—not because people who get the vaccine go to the doctor more or have fewer other health problems, since those things didn’t change in the same way for other serious diseases.

This study found that getting the shingles vaccine lowered the chance of getting dementia, and it wasn’t just because people who got the vaccine saw doctors more often or had fewer other illnesses — the effect held up even when looking at actual deaths from dementia.