Shingles Shot Might Help Keep Your Brain Stronger
A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
The vaccine’s dementia effect wasn’t explained by better healthcare, fewer other diseases, or even reduced shingles.
Most people assume if a vaccine reduces dementia, it’s because it prevents the virus that causes it. But here, even when researchers removed shingles from the equation, the effect stayed strong—and no other diseases (like heart disease or stroke) showed similar drops.
Practical Takeaways
If you're over 65 and haven’t gotten a shingles vaccine, ask your doctor about Shingrix—even though this study used Zostavax, the immune-boosting mechanism may be similar.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
The vaccine’s dementia effect wasn’t explained by better healthcare, fewer other diseases, or even reduced shingles.
Most people assume if a vaccine reduces dementia, it’s because it prevents the virus that causes it. But here, even when researchers removed shingles from the equation, the effect stayed strong—and no other diseases (like heart disease or stroke) showed similar drops.
Practical Takeaways
If you're over 65 and haven’t gotten a shingles vaccine, ask your doctor about Shingrix—even though this study used Zostavax, the immune-boosting mechanism may be similar.
Publication
Journal
Nature
Year
2025
Authors
Markus Eyting, M. Xie, Felix Michalik, Simon Heß, Seunghun Chung, P. Geldsetzer
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Claims (10)
If kids born just before and after a vaccine eligibility cutoff get vaccinated at different times, scientists can compare them to see if getting the vaccine early helps prevent dementia later in life — like a real-life experiment without random assignment.
Getting the shingles shot when you're 65 or older might help lower your chances of developing dementia by about a third over the next several years.
Getting the shingles vaccine might help lower your risk of dementia, and this isn’t just because everyone born on the same day got other free health services too — because no other program in Wales used that exact birth date as a cutoff, so the link is likely real.
Getting the shingles vaccine might help lower your risk of dementia—not just because it prevents shingles, but because it might be doing something else good for your brain, since even when scientists accounted for shingles cases, the dementia benefit stayed strong.
Older adults who got the shingles vaccine (Zostavax) were a bit less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years—about 1 in 5 fewer cases—so scientists wonder if the vaccine might help protect the brain, too.