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In this video, Stanford researcher Pascal Geldsetzer explains his study finding that the shingles vaccine can lower the chances of developing dementia.
Can dementia be warded off with a vaccine? An intriguing new study led by Pascal Geldsetzer, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco Investigator, suggests the answer is yes.
Geldsetzer conducted a “natural experiment,” taking advantage of a birthdate-based eligibility scheme by health authorities in Wales for determining who could get a shingles vaccine. Based on analysis of detailed electronic health record data, he found that the herpes zoster vaccination reduced chances of getting a dementia diagnosis in the subsequent seven years by about 20%. His study was published today in Nature.
“This could be a complete game-changer for dementia research, and it would be way more effective than anything we have so far,” says Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University.
Since finding this protective effect of the shingles vaccine in the data from Wales, he sought to replicate his findings with other datasets. “Amazingly, we find the same protective signal in dataset after dataset from different populations and countries that rolled out shingles vaccination in a similar way as Wales,” he says.
Additionally, Geldsetzer and his team conducted further analyses to understand if the vaccine had any effect at the beginning and end stages of dementia, from the likelihood of a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment to dementia-related deaths, and again found that a shingles vaccination had protective effects in both.
He is now trying to raise funds from private foundations and philanthropy to conduct a randomized clinical trial on the effect of shingles vaccination on dementia and cognition. The team wants to use a version of the older live attenuated shingles vaccine for this trial, which is no longer being manufactured in the US.
In this video (also available on YouTube), Geldsetzer explains how the Wales dataset provided the opportunity for a natural experiment, and what he hopes to do next.
