Protecting yourself from herpes zoster or shingles attenuates some altered cellular processes typical of advanced age, such as inflammation.
Can vaccines contribute to a healthy and unhurried biological aging process? A new study regarding the vaccine that protects against shingles suggests so. Based on analysis of 3,800 people aged 70 or older published in Journals of Gerontologyget vaccinated againstshingles not only protects against this painful skin rash, but also seems to postpone several biological processes characteristic of aging.
Against infection and beyond
Herpes zoster or shingles is an infection caused by the reactivation of the chickenpox virus (varicella-zoster virus, or human herpesvirus 3), which remained in the body in a latent phase. This disease occurs mainly in the elderly or in immunocompromised patients and manifests itself as a skin rash with blisters usually located in the lumbar region or chest, accompanied by debilitating pain that can continue for months after the resolution of the rash.
The vaccination against herpes zoster now offered to people over 65 years of age, at risk for previous chronic pathologies, protects against shingles and its most painful after-effects, but evidently, based on what the study found, not only from this.
In the research performed on patients registered in the healthcare database US Health and Retirement Studyresearchers at the University of Southern California studied how the shingles vaccine affected several biological aging “alarm bells.” And they discovered that those who had been vaccinated showed slower biological aging compared to peers and other conditions being equal.
Younger “inside”. But in what?
Biological aging, which does not always go hand in hand with chronological aging, is a process that measures the true state of health of the tissues and organs of our body. We can think of it as a loss of efficiency of the body’s cellular and molecular repair mechanisms.
The authors of the study measured the biological aging of the participants through seven parameters: level of inflammation, innate immunity (i.e. the body’s general ability to defend itself against infections), adaptive immunity (i.e. the body’s ability to respond to pathogens to which it had already been exposed or from which it had been vaccinated), blood flow in the heart and vessels, neurodegeneration, epigenetic changes (i.e. in the way genes are activated or deactivated), transcriptomic changes (i.e. in the way genes are transcribed into RNA to assemble proteins).
Less underlying inflammation
Those vaccinated against herpes zoster had lower levels of inflammation and slower epigenetic and transcriptomic aging.
One hypothesis is that by reducing the body’s underlying inflammation, while preventing reactivation of the chickenpox virus, the vaccine also wards off several harmful processes linked to the persistence of a chronic level of inflammation, such as cardiovascular problems and cognitive decline. This effect seems to persist over time: even those who had been vaccinated four years earlier or more still showed slower biological aging than those who were not vaccinated.