Oh my goodness! I read this headline and could hardly believe it.
“A dementia vaccine could be real, and some of us have taken it without knowing.”
Well, that’s a little misleading. We didn’t take the vaccine without knowing it. But, we didn’t know it might be good a preventing or treating dementia.
It’s the Shingles Vaccine!
I got my shingles vaccine a few years ago. I admit, it was the only vaccine where I fell ill for a day or two afterwards. Besides the expected sore arm, I had a slight fever and fatigue.
Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, published his findings in Nature. The results so stunned the scientists, that they did a follow up study, published in Cell.
A shingles vaccine could reduce your risk of dementia by 20 per cent or slow the progression of the disease once you’ve got it, according to recent research led by Stanford University, in the US.
BBC Science Focus, Dec. 02, 2025
Holy Smokes! That has the potential to help 57 million people globally.
That seems to good to be true! Is this another case of correlation, rather than causation? I mean, maybe healthier people tend to get the vaccine, and that’s why their are less likely to get dementia. Maybe the study group was too small to draw conclusions. I need a little more detail.
In 2013, scientists began studying the records of 270,000 people from Wales who were 79-80 years old. Those who received the Shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia by 2020 than those who didn’t receive the vaccine.
Dr. Geldsetzer said “This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data.”
The follow up study showed that there seemed to be a protective effect even among those that had already been diagnosed with dementia. Of the 7,049 Welsh people with dementia, nearly half had died within the following nine years. But among those who had received the vaccine, only 30% died.
The Welsh study included an interesting twist to eliminate bias.
The vaccination program was only available to people who were 79 years old on September 1, 2013.
“We know that if you take a thousand people at random born in one week, and a thousand people at random born a week later, there shouldn’t be anything different about them on average,” said Geldsetzer. “They are similar to each other apart from this tiny difference in age.”
BBC Science Focus, Dec. 02, 2025
So each group should have the same average mixture of of more or less health conscious people.
Shingles is caused by the same virus that gives kids the chicken pox (Varicella zoster.) It hangs around, dormant, in the body until it rears its ugly head again in adulthood. It causes a painful rash, burning or tingling feels, headaches, fever, and fatigue.
We know that the virus affects the nervous system. Exactly how the vaccine might protect the brain, is still unknown.
Just think, getting a child vaccinated against chicken pox just might protect his or her brain from dementia.