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Two new studies suggest that getting the vaccine against painful shingles may also be important to remember.
Approximately 98% of American adults They had chicken pox And they are prone to accidents; Both are caused by the varicella-zoster virus in the herpes family.
Herpes viruses are villi and move silently along nerve roots. They can be reactivated during times of stress or illness, or any time a person's immune system is compromised. That can cause the virus to reactivate Shingles, a rash that opens up along the trunk line or onto the neck or face. The pain of shingles varies from person to person, but can range from tingling to cramping and can last for weeks.
Increasingly, Researchers believe Some herpes viruses can also remain hidden in the brain and become active again when the immune system lowers its defenses. When they do, the theory goes, they can do that damage. It advertises Development of dementia.
There is no cure for shingles, but antiviral drugs can help treat it, and vaccines are available. In the year In 2006, Zostavax, the first vaccine for shingles, was licensed in the United States. In 2017, a strong vaccine, Shingrix, became available. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now He recommends Shingrix. Over Zostavax for adults 50 and older.
Zostavax contains a live but weakened form of the virus, but Shingrix contains only part of it: the proteins on the outer surface. Both vaccines work by teaching the body to recognize and fight back when it starts causing problems.
In clinical trials, Shingrix was 97% effective in preventing shingles, compared to 65% to 70%. Effectiveness of ZostavaxDepending on a person's age. Shingrix appears to offer longer protection, although that is still being studied.
The two new studies used this history to look back at the medical records of hundreds of thousands of people vaccinated with Shingrix and compare how often they developed dementia with people who received other vaccines.
It is difficult to remove all bias from such follow-up studies, but the researchers tried to remove one healthy user effect in particular. This means that certain people – who are more likely to take care of their health – are also more likely to engage in a variety of behaviors such as going to the doctor regularly, exercising and getting vaccinations. Similarly, unvaccinated people may be too weak or sick to vaccinate, or they may not have access to regular health care.
It is a pattern of behavior or personal circumstances rather than any specific factor that determines an individual's risk for many diseases. If researchers try to compare the vaccinated with the unvaccinated, they run the risk of comparing two fundamentally different groups of people and attributing any differences to vaccination alone.
It was the first study Published on Thursday In the journal Nature Medicine, it looked at dementia diagnoses in more than 100,000 adults 65 and older who received the Zostavax vaccine versus 100,000 adults 65 and older who received the Shingrix vaccine.
One of the study's authors, an immunologist, is a paid consultant to GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK, which makes the Shingrix vaccine, but the researchers said the company had no role in their investigation.
“In fact, they didn't even know we were doing it until the paper was ready for publication, because we wanted to go out of our way to avoid any kind of conflict,” says psychiatrist Dr. Paul Harrison. Speaking at a media briefing at the University of Oxford in England.
The researchers found that people who received Shingrix had a 17 percent lower risk of being diagnosed with dementia in the six years after the shot compared to people who received the Zostavax vaccine.
Vaccinated people did not completely avoid dementia, but it seems to be associated with delayed diagnosis. On average, according to the researchers, this represents approximately 164 diagnosis-free days or five months of additional time for those affected.
This type of study cannot prove that the vaccines are directly responsible for the differences between the groups. If further studies show that shingles vaccines protect memory and cognitive function, “public health That's not going to be an easy discovery,” Harrison said.
Experts who were not involved in the study said there is increasing evidence that shingles vaccines help protect the brain.
Dr Andrew Doig, a biochemist at the University of Manchester, said: “There is some evidence that the previous live vaccine may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
The new vaccine appears to reduce the risk, he said.
“This is a significant result, comparable in efficacy to recent Alzheimer's antibody drugs. disease,” said Doig.
It's not clear why, but the association was stronger in women who received Shingrix. Over the next six years, women who received Zostavax were 22 percent less likely to develop dementia than women who received Zostavax. Men had a low risk of 13%.
The team then compared elderly people who received the Shingrix vaccine with those who received the flu vaccine and the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus combination. People who got the shingles shot were 23 percent less likely to forget, and 28 percent less likely than those who got the tDAP vaccine, supporting the idea that there is something special about the declining shingles vaccination. The risk of forgetting.
Dr Shiona Scales, director of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said in written comments: “It is important to study this clear result further.”
While research into whether vaccines affect dementia continues, people should be aware that there are other factors linked to the risk of dementia. These include things like smoking, high blood pressure, and excessive alcohol consumption. And controlling those can make a difference in mental health, too.
A second study, scheduled to be presented Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, uses the same methodology as the Oxford study, and its conclusions mirror its findings.
It was sponsored by GSK, which issued a news release announcing the results. The full study has not yet been peer-reviewed by outside experts or published in a medical journal.
This study uses another large electronic health records database maintained by the healthcare company Optum.
By extracting data from nearly 600,000 patients, researchers were able to compare the incidence of dementia in people 50 and older who were vaccinated with the shingles vaccine — the old Zostavax vaccine or the new Shingrix vaccine — with those who were vaccinated with Pneumovax. It protects against bacterial infections that cause throat and pneumonia.
After getting the shingles vaccine, the people in the study were less likely to develop dementia than those who only got the Pneumovax vaccine.
After five years, people who received Zostavax were 8% less likely to develop dementia and those who received Shingrix had 20% fewer cases of Shingrix in their health records compared to people who received the Pneumovax vaccine. This finding suggests that prevention of shingles virus may be due to the vaccine alone or to the healthy influence of the user.
This study also found that the new shingles vaccine was associated with greater benefit than the old one. People who received the Shingrix vaccine were 23 percent less likely to be diagnosed with dementia after five years than those who received Zostavax.
Although the findings are intriguing, the association needs more study before researchers can know for sure whether the shingles vaccine is behind the benefits.
Dr. Phil Dormitzer, who heads GSK's vaccine research and development, said: “The data is more of an indication for further study than a suggestion that we should change how we use the vaccine at this point.”
So the best reason to get the shingles vaccine for now is to avoid suffering from shingles.