Risk for Dementia Reduced With Receipt of Herpes Zoster Vaccine

TUESDAY, June 16, 2026 (HealthDay News) — The risk for dementia is reduced with receipt of the recombinant herpes zoster (HZ) vaccine (RZV) during admission to a skilled-nursing facility or within 12 months, according to a study published online June 16 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Kaleen N. Hayes, Pharm.D., Ph.D., from the Brown University School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues conducted a cohort study using target trial emulation and the clone-censor-weight approach to estimate the association between dementia and receipt of the RZV among older adults recently admitted to a skilled-nursing facility for postacute or long-term care.

The study cohort included 509,926 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 66 years or older who were admitted to a skilled-nursing facility between Jan. 1, 2017, and Dec. 31, 2022, with no diagnosed dementia, who were eligible for RZV. The researchers found that 8,843 participants (1.73 percent) received at least one RZV dose within 12 months after admission; of these, 87.0 percent received RZV after discharge. RZV receipt was associated with a lower risk for dementia (5.8 percentage points; risk ratio, 0.76; four-year risk, 18.8 versus 24.6 percent for at least one versus no RZV). In men and those with prior live HZ vaccination, associations were attenuated.

“A pragmatic randomized trial of skilled-nursing facility residents may be a valuable next step to establish more definitive causal evidence in this population, given the wealth of clinical and functional data regularly collected in this setting,” the authors write.

The study was funded by GlaxoSmithKline.

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