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Study suggests shingles vaccine may lower dementia risk
(www.brown.edu)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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For some reason i think of the myth that got spread around about wine being healthy for your heart. Are we sure it's not just a correlation that people who get the vaccine tend to be in a better position to stay healthy than those that may not be able to or refuse the vaccine?
Edit: just to be clear i agree the vaccine is awesome.
Wine being healthy was from epidemiology - the sort of study that sends out tens of thousands of food frequency questionnaires asking people to detail what categories of food each participant ate over the prior 5 years.
All it really said is the kind of person who says they have 1 glass of wine each day is healthier than the kind of person who says they have none
An earlier similar study was done that said people who claimed to consume eggs had worse heart health. This one was tested later by a controlled trial where people were told to eat or not eat eggs. That study found eggs were protective against heart disease.
Shingles is a herpes. Other herpes viruses are also linked to dementia. It’s probably not a coincidence.
As my doctor said when she said I should get the vaccine: If this study is true, it's great it great, but even if this study turns out to be false, it doesn't matter because I should get the vaccine anyway.
There are half a dozen studies with the same conclusions. The best was in UK, where because of some stupid rule, people born a week later could not get Shingrex, so they ended up with a huge control population. Interestingly, the protective effect is only seen in women.
But other studies show protection effects from all vaccines in elderly.
No, there is actual mechanism here, and it's not just shingles vaccine. Older people who get frequent vaccinations have lower incidence of Alzheimer's. The reason is that infection causes a strong immune response that releases a lot of reactive oxygen species. In young people, their mitochondria can deal with this, but in older people mitochondria don't work as well and brains get more oxidative damage. Zoster is just a virus more prevalent in neurons.
The one fact buried in the Shingrex effect is that it appears to occur in women only.