EURO NEWS – Older adults who got the shingles vaccine may be at significantly lower risk of developing dementia, a new study in Wales has found.
The study, which was published in the journal Nature, included about 283,000 older adults who were either deemed eligible or not to receive the shingles jab due to a quirk in Welsh vaccine policy.
In 2013, Wales’ government made 79-year-olds eligible for the shingles vaccine, and from then on, people aged into the programme when they turned 79.
But due to limited supplies, adults who were 80 or older at the time were never offered the jab.
Researchers from the US, Germany, and Austria homed in on people who turned 80 the week before the vaccine eligibility cutoff and compared them to those who turned 80 the following week.
About half of those who were eligible got the vaccine.
After seven years, about one in eight people who did not get the vaccine had dementia. But those who got the jab were 20 per cent less likely to be diagnosed, the study found.
The effects were much stronger among women than men.
“It was a really striking finding,” Dr Pascal Geldsetzer, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University in the US, said in a statement.
“This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data”.
Other studies have also suggested that the shingles vaccine could help keep dementia at bay.
Last year, an analysis published in Nature Medicine showed that people who got a newer version of the shingles vaccine were at significantly lower risk of developing dementia in the six years after they were immunised.
The two vaccines are made differently. The newer, more common jab contains a protein from the varicella zoster virus, which causes both chickenpox and shingles. The vaccine in the Welsh study used a weakened live version of the virus …
