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Once in a while, the real world presents just the right set of ingredients to carry out a natural scientific experiment. That’s just what happened when an international team of researchers took advantage of a policy in Wales that allowed people born on or after Sept. 2, 1933, to receive the shingles vaccine. Those born before that date were ineligible.
This provided a framework for something that’s nearly impossible to study when it comes to vaccines, for ethical reasons: a control group that couldn’t receive the shingles vaccine.
The researchers discovered that those who received the vaccine were one-fifth less likely to develop dementia over a seven-year follow-up period than those who didn’t.
That finding – along with other related research – raise the intriguing possibility that vaccines may play a protective role in preventing dementia, explain physician scientists Anand Kumar and Jalees Rehman.
While the understanding of how vaccines might work in protecting against dementia and other diseases is still in its infancy, the findings present exciting possibilities for new therapeutics.
“The process of doing science has a way of teaching researchers like us humility,” Kumar and Rehman write, “opening our minds to new information, learning from our mistakes and going where that data takes us in our quest for effective, lifesaving therapies.”
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