The shingles vaccine may reduce the risk of developing dementia. According to a new study, older adults who had received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia in the seven years after than their unvaccinated counterparts. 

The study authors looked at the records of more than 280,000 older adults between the ages of 71 and 88 who did not have dementia when they received the shingles vaccine. They then compared outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated patients over a seven-year span. Not surprisingly, the vaccine lowered the incidence of shingles by about 37% in vaccinated individuals; but researchers also determined that at the end of the seven-year period, the rate of dementia was 1 in 8 patients overall but 20% lower in those people who had received the shingles vaccine. The findings also indicated that the protection against dementia was greater in women than in men. The researchers indicated that this could be due to gender differences in immune response or the way dementia develops. 

“It was a really striking finding. This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data,” said senior author Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, PhD. He hopes that this study’s findings will encourage more studies and funding for such research. For instance, it would be interesting to look at whether a newer version of the vaccine will have a similar or greater effect on dementia.