Shingles Shot Might Help Keep Your Brain Stronger

This Vaccine is Quietly Doing Something to Your Heart

Dr Brad Stanfield

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.

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 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.