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Shivaji Huttler's avatar

Does the study mention benefits of the shingles vaccine on people who are already diagnosed with dementia? My wife is now in advanced stages of dementia. She has received the Shingrex vaccine recently.

Tommy Wood, BM BCh (MD), PhD's avatar

We mentioned the study in Wales (which found a greater benefit in women), and an analysis from that dataset suggested some benefit in terms of progression of cognitive impairment and dementia-related mortality (and maybe therefore all-cause mortality) those who had a diagnosis of cognitive impairment/dementia at the time of vaccination. The caveat being that this was with Zostavax and not Shingrix, and that the more slices you take of a population and the more outcomes you look at the more cautious you have to be about the interpretation. But certainly no signal of harm. I hope that helps! https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/s0092-8674(25)01256-5

George Brock's avatar

what is a good interval for shingles vaccine?

I had one probably fifteen years ago and am 82 years old now.

Tommy Wood, BM BCh (MD), PhD's avatar

This study suggested that the protection from Shingrix decreased over time and was mainly in the first ~5 years after dosing: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03201-5

Dr Mark Chern's avatar

Great article. What makes this finding worth paying attention to is that each country's natural experiment was independently designed, with different populations, different healthcare systems, and different eligibility cutoffs. Getting the same signal across all of them is genuinely unusual in this kind of research!

Maureen Braen's avatar

Is there any data in the study that shows more or less potential benefit of the vaccine for APoE4 risk factor?