Post #63561 by PucksFool on the US Policy board

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... than a painful bout of shingles. It is being linked to preventing or slowing dementia.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01256-5

Highlights

• Herpes zoster vaccination reduced dementia diagnosis in our prior natural experiments
• Here, we find a lower occurrence of MCI and dementia deaths among dementia patients
• Herpes zoster vaccination appears to act along the entire clinical course of dementia
• This study’s approach avoids the common confounding concerns of observational data

Summary

Using natural experiments, we have previously reported that live-attenuated herpes zoster (HZ) vaccination appears to have prevented or delayed dementia diagnoses in both Wales and Australia. Here, we find that HZ vaccination also reduces mild cognitive impairment diagnoses and, among patients living with dementia, deaths due to dementia. Exploratory analyses suggest that the effects are not driven by a specific dementia type. Our approach takes advantage of the fact that individuals who had their eightieth birthday just after the start date of the HZ vaccination program in Wales were eligible for the vaccine for 1 year, whereas those who had their eightieth birthday just before were ineligible and remained ineligible for life. The key strength of our natural experiments is that these comparison groups should be similar in all characteristics except for a minute difference in age. Our findings suggest that live-attenuated HZ vaccination prevents or delays mild cognitive impairment and dementia and slows the disease course among those already living with dementia.

/snip to the conclusions

In conclusion, this study suggests that HZ vaccination slows or prevents disease progression across the entire disease course (as far as it can be feasibly ascertained from electronic health record data) of dementia. By taking advantage of the fact that the UK’s National Health Service assigned individuals who differed in their age by just a few weeks to being eligible or ineligible for HZ vaccination based on their date of birth, we were able to generate evidence that is more likely to be causal than those from more standard epidemiological analyses. Our finding that HZ vaccination had a beneficial effect on two different dementia-related outcomes in two different patient samples—and at two opposing ends of the disease course of dementia—thus provides promising evidence that HZ vaccination may prevent or slow the dementia disease process in a substantial proportion of individuals.

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