Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Getting the shingles shot doesn’t seem to make older people healthier in general—but it might specifically help lower their risk of dementia, and that’s probably not just a coincidence.
Correlational
Getting the shingles vaccine might help lower the risk of dementia in women a lot more than in men—and it doesn’t seem to help men at all—so maybe men and women’s brains respond differently to the vaccine.
Getting the shingles shot when you're in your late 70s might lower your risk of getting dementia by about 20% over the next seven years—maybe because the virus that causes shingles could also be involved in brain changes that lead to dementia.
In Wales, older people who are healthier and have more money or education are more likely to get the shingles shot, while those who are sicker or live in care homes are less likely to get it—so whether someone gets the vaccine might just show how healthy and proactive they are about their health.
Getting the shingles shot might help lower your risk of dementia—even if you still get shingles afterward—suggesting the vaccine protects your brain in ways beyond just preventing the rash.
Mechanistic
People who get the shingles vaccine tend to live longer and have fewer heart attacks, strokes, and broken hips—but this might not be because the vaccine itself causes these benefits; it could just be that healthier people are more likely to get vaccinated.
Getting the shingles shot might lower your risk of a type of dementia caused by blood vessel problems in the brain more than it lowers your risk of Alzheimer’s, which is caused by brain plaques — so it might be helping your brain’s blood flow more than it’s cleaning up gunk.
People in Wales aged 70 and older who got the shingles shot were 28% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over the next six years — but that doesn’t mean the vaccine prevents dementia, just that the two seem to be linked in some way.
Getting the shingles shot might help lower your risk of dementia, and this benefit isn’t just because people who got the shot didn’t get shingles later or didn’t take antiviral drugs — it’s something else about the vaccine itself.
Getting the shingles vaccine doesn’t seem to help or hurt one racial group more than another when it comes to avoiding dementia in older U.S. veterans.
Getting the shingles vaccine might help older people avoid dementia—especially those over 75 or in their late 60s—but it doesn’t seem to help much for people in their early 70s, suggesting age matters.
Getting the shingles shot might lower your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease by about a quarter to a third when you’re 65 or older — at least, that’s what some big health studies have noticed.
Getting the shingles shot might help lower your risk of getting dementia later in life — a big study found people who got the vaccine were about 31% less likely to develop dementia than those who didn’t.
People with long-term pancreas inflammation are often at risk of not getting enough nutrients — about 1 in 3 of them show signs they might be malnourished, based on a simple screening test.
Descriptive
Some people have genes that make it harder for their body to turn plant fats into the good anti-inflammatory fats, which makes them more likely to get acne or psoriasis.
In skin with psoriasis, eczema, or acne, there’s too much of certain fatty acids that cause inflammation and not enough of the ones that calm it down — like having too much gas and not enough brake in your car.
A special cream made from a natural anti-inflammatory substance works just as well as a mild steroid cream to calm down eczema in babies, without the side effects.
Quantitative
Taking fish oil supplements (which have EPA and DHA) might help calm down skin inflammation by boosting natural healing chemicals and lowering inflammation signs, but sometimes it works really well and other times it doesn’t — it’s inconsistent.
When your skin stays red and irritated for too long—like in eczema, psoriasis, or acne—it might be because your body isn’t making enough of its natural ‘stop-signaling’ chemicals that normally calm down inflammation.
When fat cells start showing up in the pancreas, they seem to attract immune cells called macrophages and monocytes to the insulin-producing islands (islets), which might cause inflammation and hurt the pancreas’s ability to regulate blood sugar.
When you're overweight, your body makes more of a fat molecule called palmitate, which can kill insulin-producing cells in your pancreas and make nearby fat cells angry and inflamed—kind of like turning up the volume on inflammation—by activating a specific alarm system called TLR4.
When your liver and pancreas get fatty, a protein called Fetuin-A wakes up immune cells in the pancreas, making them pump out a chemical that causes swelling and irritation—kind of like a false alarm that turns into a local riot.
When your liver gets fatty, it releases a protein called Fetuin-A that messes up the pancreas’s ability to release insulin when blood sugar rises—this happens through a specific cellular glitch, not the usual inflammation pathway.
When the pancreas gets fatty, especially in people whose blood sugar is already high, it doesn’t make enough insulin — like a factory that’s clogged with grease and can’t produce its product properly.