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Have you gotten the shingles vaccination? What about the flu vax? If so, I have good news and more good news for you…and your brain.
Of the many factors that contribute to healthy aging—exercise, diet, the gratitude attitude, and social connections, to name a few— the most surprising may be this one: Getting vaccinated. According to the latest research, getting vaccinated may contribute not only to your lifespan—the number of years you will live— but also to your healthspan—the amount of time you will live without major health problems, including cognitive decline.
Lifespan
Taking lifespan first, it’s no secret that getting vaccinated contributes to a longer life for individuals who get them. Vaccinations have boosted average life expectancy for people around the globe. With vaccinations, you are completely or partially protected against at least 20 diseases. Moreover, getting “the jab” has other personal and public health advantages, such as:
- Preventing or reducing the effects of infectious disease outbreaks.
- Preventing severe disease, hospitalization, disability, and death.
- Reducing the viral load in infected people, so that they are less contagious.
- Protecting those who can’t be vaccinated, such as babies less than six months old.
While myths about vaccinations continue to circulate, including the long-discredited myth that vaccines cause autism, it is extremely rare for people to experience a serious side-effect from a vaccination.
Healthspan
So, getting vaccinated enables you to live a longer life. But now, several recent studies indicate that at least two vaccinations—the flu vax and the shingles vax—are also linked with a lowered risk of cognitive decline. While these studies show correlation, not causation, the results are striking. Here is the research:
The Flu Vaccine. In a giant nation-wide study from 2022, researchers compared over 900,000 flu-vaccinated patients with the same number of unvaccinated patients. The results: “During 4-year follow-up appointments, about 5.1 percent of flu-vaccinated patients were found to have developed Alzheimer’s disease (whereas) 8.5 percent of non-vaccinated patients had developed Alzheimer’s disease during follow-up.” That amounts to a 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease just from getting the flu vaccination.
As I say in this post, “Why a flu shot might have a protective effect is not clear. Some experts speculate that vaccinations activate the immune system in a way that wards off or slows dementia processes.”
The Shingles Vaccine. Recently, three studies, described by Elizabeth Cohen in the Washington Post here, indicated that the shingles vaccination also seemed to have a strong protective effect against dementia.
We don’t hear much about shingles, so I was shocked to discover that shingles was not an uncommon illness. Shingles is widespread in the U.S., with one out of three people destined to get shingles in their lifetime. As described by Cohen, “The infection is a reactivation of the chickenpox virus, which can lie dormant in the nervous system. While rarely life-threatening, shingles causes distressing symptoms, including a painful rash with blisters that can last for several weeks. It can also lead to blindness and to neurological pain that can persist for months or years.”
As for the connection to cognitive health, three studies point to similar benefits. In one, the study authors (who were affiliated with Glaxo Smith Kline, the makers of one type of shingles vaccination, the Shingrix vaccine) sorted through the medical records of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. They discovered that in the five years following the vaccination, those who received the Shingrix vax were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than people in a control group who received a vax for a different illness.
Lest you worry that unconscious bias was involved in the above study, two other studies of the shingles vaccination from independent researchers also found brain benefits. For example, “researchers in the United Kingdom published a study in Nature Medicine looking at medical records of hundreds of thousands of people over six years and found that those who received Shingrix were 23 to 27 percent less likely to develop dementia compared with people who received vaccines against other diseases.”
Another study, led by Stanford researchers, found similar results when they compared 282,000 people in Wales who received a different shingles vaccine (not Shingrix) to those who did not receive the vaccine. Specifically, those who received the vaccine had a 22.4% lower risk of a dementia diagnosis in the 7 years after being vaxxed.
In the end, the three studies show consistent results: Those vaccinated against shingles received a brain bonus—about a 20% lower risk of a dementia diagnosis.
The “How” of Brain Protection: Theories
So, shingles and flu vaccinations seem to possess the power to lower dementia risk, according to current research. But why and how?
One possibility is that just getting a serious disease like shingles or the flu could itself raise the risk of cognitive decline. Enduring and recovering from diseases take a toll on the body and brain. With regard to shingles, recent research provides some evidence for this theory.
Another possibility is that some cases of dementia could be traced to an infectious agent, such as a bacteria or virus. In the case of shingles, previous research suggests that the herpes virus, the virus that causes both chickenpox and shingles, might be the culprit. Shingrix and other vaxes dramatically decrease the reactivation of the herpes virus, reducing the risk for brain problems.
Other experts hypothesize that the flu and shingles vaccinations might stimulate the immune system in a particular way that decreases the chances of dementia.
Whatever the reason, it is exciting that researchers are expanding their ideas of what could cause dementia beyond the standard explanation of “aging.”
Conclusion
Vaccinations are considered one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century. This recent research tells us that we may have even more reasons to grateful for them. Make a habit of keeping up with your vaccinations, and you might be rewarded in unexpected ways—longer lifespan, longer healthspan, and longer “brainspan.”
(c) Meg Selig, 2024. All rights reserved. For permissions, click here.
