What if a vaccine could curb the risk of dementia? Research led by Pascal Geldsetzer, a Stanford University assistant professor of medicine, suggests there\u2019s already a shot that may do just that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Recent<\/a> studies<\/a> published<\/a> in 2025 and 2026 by Geldsetzer and his collaborators that analyzed the health records of millions of people in Wales, Australia, and Canada found that getting the shingles vaccine could prevent or delay dementia. Shingles vaccination appeared to avert about one in five<\/a> new dementia diagnoses over a seven-year period, the research showed.<\/p>\n Earlier research had pointed in a similar direction, though a causative link hadn\u2019t been established. By using an innovative research approach, Geldsetzer says he has been able to take existing data from electronic health records and generate comparison groups similar to a clinical trial, the gold standard for medical research.<\/p>\n He hopes to now conduct a clinical trial to confirm the findings. The shingles vaccine \u201ccould be an inexpensive, safe, and scalable dementia intervention, which would have huge public-health implications,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if a vaccine could curb the risk of dementia? Research led by Pascal Geldsetzer, a Stanford University…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[77477,64,63,10967,137,500,77478,5275,77479,77480,241396],"class_list":{"0":"post-474829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-accolades","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-franchise","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-healthcare","14":"tag-list","15":"tag-magazine","16":"tag-special-project","17":"tag-sponsorshipblock","18":"tag-time100-health-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}