“A new study strengthens the case that the shingles vaccine might lower dementia risk. By using an age-based rollout in Wales as a natural experiment, scientists found vaccinated elderly people were about 20 percent less likely to develop dementia over seven years than those just outside the eligibility cutoff,” reports The Doomslayer.
The BBC adds:
In a study published in Nature, the scientists analyzed the health records of more than 280,000 adults in Wales between the ages of 71 and 88 years old. They were aiming to understand the effects of a shingles vaccination program that began in 2013.
They found that older adults (aged 79–80) who had received the shingles vaccine were 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia by 2020, compared to those who hadn’t been eligible to receive it.
What’s more, in a recent follow-up study published in Cell, the same scientists discovered that the shingles vaccine seemed to have a protective effect even among those who’d already been diagnosed with dementia by 2013.
Of the 7,049 Welsh adults included in the study who had dementia, nearly half had died within the following nine years. But among those who had received the shingles vaccine, only 30 per cent had died.
“The most exciting part is that this really suggests that the shingles vaccine doesn’t have only preventive, delaying benefits for dementia, but also therapeutic potential for those who already have dementia.”
People don’t get shingles unless they previously had chicken pox. So chicken pox vaccination reduces shingles risk.
“Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children”, says Our World in Data. But measles vaccination rates have fallen in the U.S., and as a result, unvaccinated children have died this year of measles in Los Angeles and Texas.
