In addition to protecting people from the blistering rash, the vaccine may also lower the risk of heart disease, scientists suggest August 26 in Nature Medicine. People who got the recombinant shingles vaccine Shingrix were less likely to develop serious heart problems than those who had received the older form of the vaccine, reports Maxime Taquet, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, and his colleagues. Taquet calls the potential bonus benefits “puzzling and interesting and intriguing.” The vaccine might be helping our health in ways no one had expected, he says.
Shingles, a painful rash caused by the same virus behind chicken pox, affects some 1 million people each year in the United States. The first shingles vaccine used a weakened form of the virus to stimulate the immune system. That vaccine, which was discontinued in 2017, made headlines last year after a Stanford study suggested it may lower the risk of dementia.
Taquet’s team had previously reported something similar with Shingrix, the new shingles vaccine, which is made from a small piece of viral protein, rather than the entire virus. (Recent work has questioned the link between dementia protection and the old vaccine — but that doubt has not extended to the new vaccine.) Taquet’s team wondered if Shingrix might somehow protect blood vessels in the brain, and perhaps elsewhere in the body. If so, the researchers would expect to see some cardiovascular benefits. They used a natural experiment to test the idea.
The team compared people who had received the old vaccine in 2017 with those who received the new vaccine in 2018 and followed their electronic health records for seven years. Halfway into the follow-up, those vaccinated with Shingrix had 1.3 percent fewer cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure, heart attack and stroke than those who received the old vaccine, the team discovered. That translates to heart problems in 96 out of 1,000 people versus 109 out of 1,000 people, Taquet says.
The difference may sound minimal, but cardiovascular disease is the world’s leading cause of death. Decreasing the risk by even a little bit, Taquet says, could save thousands of lives. If his team’s results are confirmed in clinical trials, he says, “the impact would be enormous.”
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