According to a study carried out by a Belgian researcher at the University of Oxford, the use of a new vaccine against shingles has been linked to a reduced risk of cardiovascular events and coronary heart disease.
Many older people are affected by shingles, a condition caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which flares up in people who have previously had chickenpox.
A team of researchers led by Belgian Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford has compared thousands of medical records of patients who were treated with the previous Zostavax vaccine with those of patients vaccinated with Shingrix, introduced in the United States in 2017.
This large-scale study, published in Nature Medicine, shows that use of the latest vaccine, Shingrix, is associated with a 9% reduction in the overall burden of cardiovascular disease compared with Zostavax. More specifically, the researchers observed a 10% reduction in ischaemic heart disease (heart conditions characterised by an insufficient supply of blood and oxygen to the heart muscle) and a 12% reduction in heart failure. Among men who had received Shingrix, there was a 12% decrease in the risk of stroke, and a 7% decrease in cases of atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm) was also observed.
The Oxford team, led by the Belgian specialist in brain imaging – a former researcher at UCLouvain – had already established a correlation between this new vaccine and a reduction in coronary heart disease, highlighting a lower risk of dementia.
In the near future, "vaccinating older adults against shingles could prevent hundreds of thousands of coronary heart diseases, strokes and cases of heart failure worldwide, making it one of the most impactful interventions we could offer to protect both the brain and the heart in later life," concludes the Belgian researcher.
