Get this trait reduce the risk of dementia of the elderly by 20%

Most people know that exercise, healthy eating and keeping their minds active can reduce the risk of dementia.

But with the expected number of Americans living with dementia for up to 13.8 million in 2060, hunting is in place for anything that can help prevent this devastating disease.

Now, a new study of Stanford’s medicine has presented some of the strongest evidence, but there is already a vaccine to help prevent dementia, unless it is for a totally different condition.

The researchers analyzed the health records of more than 280,000 adults in Wales, and found that those who received the vaccine against tiles had 20% less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years compared to those who did not.

“It was a really surprising find,” said Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer, a medical assistant professor at Stanford. “This huge signal of protection was there, how the data was looked at.”

Shingles is a painful eruption condition caused by reactivation of the varicose-zoster virus, which remains latent in the nerve cells after someone has chickenpox.

While the exact link between the shingles and dementia vaccine is unknown, some believe that the reactivation of the neurodegenerative condition can reduce neuroinflamation, a factor involved in the development of dementia.

The study is different in an important way.

Previous investigations have shown a link between the tiles and dementia vaccine, for example, a 2024 study of the University of Oxford found that the new recombinant shingrix vaccine, Shingrix, was associated with a reduction in 17% dementia risk compared to its predecessor, Zostavax.

However, research has not been able to take into account the impact of lifestyle factors on results.

“All of these associations suffer from the basic problem that vaccinated people have different health behaviors than those who do not,” said Geldsetzer.

“In general, they are not considered to be solid enough to make any recommendation,” he said.

Above all, the new study took advantage of a unique public health policy in Wales, in which people who had been 80 years old just after September 1, 2013 were eligible for the shingles vaccine, while those who turned 80 years ago were not.

This natural division allowed researchers to compare dementia rates between two very similar groups.

“We know that if you take a thousand random people born in a week and a thousand random people born a week later, there should be nothing different on average,” said Geldsetzer. “They are similar to each other, apart from this small age difference.”

“What makes the study so powerful is that it is essentially a random trial with a control group, those a little too old to be eligible for the vaccine, and a group of intervention, the young enough to be eligible,” he added.

Even when other factors are counted, such as the levels of education and the history of vaccination, the team found that the two groups were practically indistinguishable apart from the fall of dementia cases at the shingle vaccine cohort.

“Due to the unique way to combat the vaccine, the bias in the analysis is much less likely to be the case,” said Geldsetzer. “The signal of our data was so strong, so clear and so persistent.”

As with Oxford’s study, this new study found that the protective benefits of the vaccine were higher among women than men, possibly because women are more prone to tiles.

The Stanford team has replicated the study in several other countries over the last two years with similar results.

They are now waiting to launch a large random controlled test to strengthen the tests.

“It would be a very simple and pragmatic essay because we have a unique intervention that we know is safe,” said Geldsetzer.

Can the other fists fight dementia?

Interestingly, this is not the only vaccine that has been shown to reduce the risk of dementia. Uthealth Houston found in 2023 that the tetanus vaccination and diphtheria was related to a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

In the previous year, the same research team published another study that found at least one flu vaccine made people 40% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who had never achieved a flu.

“We and other hypothesize that the immune system is responsible for causing dysfunction of brain cells in Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. Paul E. Schulz, a neurologist and senior author of the document.

“Findings suggest that vaccination has a more general effect on the immune system that reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.”