The Shingles Vaccine and Brain Health: What’s the Link?
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Can the Shingles Vaccine Help Protect Your Brain Health?

Can the Shingles Vaccine Help Protect Your Brain Health?
Everyday Health
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Published on May 14, 2026
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The shingles vaccine is used to prevent the shingles virus, an infection that causes painful, itchy blisters on the skin. Researchers are also exploring whether it may offer another, less obvious benefit: protecting brain health and reducing the risk of dementia.

It’s recommended that adults in the United States who are age 50 and older get the shingles vaccine, also called the recombinant zoster vaccine (Shingrix). It’s a two-dose series designed to protect against the reactivation of the varicella-zoster (aka herpes zoster) virus, the same virus responsible for chickenpox. It has efficacy rates of about 97 percent for people age 50 to 69, and over 91 percent for people over age 70.

Beyond protection against shingles itself, researchers are studying whether reducing the virus’s reactivation — and its accompanying inflammatory response — may have wider effects on the body, especially the brain. Emerging research is even investigating whether vaccines could one day be repurposed as a preventive method or a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Shingles Vaccine and Brain Health: What the Research Shows

Researchers first noticed the potential link between shingles vaccination and brain health in a natural experiment study that analyzed health records from more than 280,000 older adults living in Wales. (A natural experiment is an observational study that uses real-world policies to create comparison groups that are otherwise very similar.

) The people studied had received the live-attenuated (weakened) herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax), which was discontinued in the United States in 2020 and replaced by the more effective recombinant zoster vaccine (Shingrix), which does not use a live form of the virus.

For this group of people in Wales, shingles vaccine eligibility was determined by birth date as of September 2013. People who were age 80, born before September 2, 1933, were not eligible for vaccination, while those born on or after that date were, providing researchers with the opportunity to do a large-scale study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The study found that at follow-up seven years later, those who received the vaccine had a 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia.

 The researchers said the study was as close to a randomized, controlled trial — considered the gold standard in research, in which a treatment group is compared with a control group who received no treatment —  as you could get without conducting one.

And the research on the link has grown, according to Jason Tetro, a microbiologist in Edmonton, Canada, and the author of The Germ Files and The Germ Code.  “Since then other studies have either confirmed or added more valuable information to show that getting the shingles vaccine does indeed help to reduce the risk or severity of dementia,” he says.

A follow-up study suggested that shingles vaccination was linked not only to lower dementia diagnoses but to possibly slowing the progression of dementia in people who already had it.

 They found fewer cases of mild cognitive impairment, which raises the risk of dementia, and overall lower dementia-related death in people already diagnosed with the progressive illness.
And research on the newer recombinant zoster vaccine has shown that, like the previous live vaccine, it significantly lowers the risk of dementia in the six years following vaccination. One study found that it was also associated with a 17 percent delay in dementia diagnosis among those who were eventually affected. Because this vaccine is newer, there isn’t as much data, though research is ongoing.

Conversely, research has found that people who experienced shingles had about a 20 percent higher risk of later reporting cognitive decline. In a separate observational study following more than 149,000 middle-aged and older adults for over a decade, researchers noted that those who had the virus reactivate were more likely to report early cognitive impairment symptoms, such as memory lapses and confusion that can indicate dementia later on.

While these findings are promising, evidence is still evolving and has a long way to go before the vaccine is recommended to prevent or treat dementia, says William Schaffner, MD, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

He calls the research “early, but accumulating. It's provocative, it's exciting, and it's absolutely fascinating” from the point of view of how a disease develops.

Researchers are still working to understand the link, though. “The question right now is why – that’s what we’re not totally sure of,” says Ankush Bansal, MD, a lifestyle medicine physician and hospitalist in Westlake, Florida.

One leading theory centers on inflammation, Dr. Bansal says. When the varicella-zoster virus reactivates later in life as shingles, it triggers a widespread inflammatory response in the body. That inflammation goes beyond skin deep, affecting the nervous system and, potentially, the brain.

“Inflammation from shingles may contribute to vascular damage and neurological effects, and reducing that inflammatory burden may lower long-term risk,” he says.

Who Should Get the Shingles Vaccine?

Current guidelines recommend the shingles vaccine for people age 50 and older, as well as those age 19 and older who are immunocompromised or at a higher risk due to medical conditions or treatments.

That recommendation is rooted in how shingles develops. After a person recovers from chickenpox, the virus remains dormant in the body for life. But as the immune system weakens with age, the virus can reactivate — sometimes decades later — causing shingles.

“With increasing age, you have an increasing occurrence of shingles,” Dr. Schaffner says. “If you’re lucky enough to reach 80 years of age, you have somewhere between a one-third to one-half chance of having had shingles by that time if you haven’t been vaccinated,” he says.

For people in these higher-risk groups, the benefits of vaccination extend beyond avoiding a painful rash. Preventing shingles also means protecting against potential long-term complications such as lasting nerve damage (postherpetic neuralgia) and vision loss.

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Resources
  1. Promising Research Into Shingles Vaccine as a Treatment for Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer’s Society. Tuesday, November 18, 2025.
  2. Shingles (Herpes Zoster). World Health Organization. March 24, 2025.
  3. Proven Outstanding Efficacy. Shingrix.
  4. Messer LC. Natural Experiment. Encyclopedia of Epidemiology. 2008.
  5. Eyting M et al. A Natural Experiment on the Effect of Herpes Zoster Vaccination on Dementia. Nature. April 2, 2025.
  6. Shingles Vaccine for Older Adults: Cost, Coverage, and What You Need to Know. National Council on Aging. October 6, 2025.
  7. Bai N. For Those Living with Dementia, New Study Suggests Shingles Vaccine Could Slow the Disease. Stanford Medicine. April 2, 2025.
  8. Xie M et al. The Effect of Shingles Vaccination at Different Stages of the Dementia Disease Course. Cell. December 11, 2025.
  9. Taquet M et al. The Recombinant Shingles Vaccine Is Associated With Lower Risk of Dementia. Nature Medicine. July 25, 2024.
  10. Yeh T-S et al. Herpes Zoster and Long-Term Risk of Subjective Cognitive Decline. Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy. August 14, 2024.
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