Latest news with #Geldsetzer
Telegraph
15-04-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Five surprising everyday medications that can help prevent dementia
At times, getting older can feel like a never-ending list of health check-ups. Vaccines you're now eligible for, screenings to arrange, and a firm suggestion from your GP to begin a new course of medication. We're often warned about the long-term effects of certain drugs, but there are some midlife jabs or pills which appear to have hidden protective qualities, especially for the brain. Take shingles vaccines for instance. A new study from Stanford University published in the renowned journal Nature, has discovered that being vaccinated in mid to later life against this painful viral rash prevents one in five new dementia cases over the next seven years, based on the examination of electronic health records. The findings have caused such a stir that Dr Pascal Geldsetzer, the Stanford epidemiologist behind the study, told The Telegraph that he's now seeking to raise funds from private foundations and philanthropists to conclusively test whether shingles vaccination can prevent cognitive decline in a clinical trial. 'This is what we need to really convince the public health and medical community,' he says. So why might a shingles jab be protecting the brain, and what are the other midlife immunisations and medications that seem to do the same? 1. Shingles vaccine Dr Geldsetzer isn't the only person to have uncovered evidence that shingles jabs might help shield the brain from dementia. Last year, another study found that the Shingrix vaccine, which is currently available on the NHS for everyone over 65, leads to a 17 per cent reduced risk of dementia compared with older shingles vaccines. You can also get the Shingrix vaccine sooner if you're willing to pay to receive it privately. It's currently licenced for all over-50s with a full two dose course costing £460 from Boots. While the benefits appear to be very real, scientists are still attempting to figure out exactly what's going on. In recent years, suggestions of an infectious origin to Alzheimer's disease have been steadily gaining traction and Dr Geldsetzer says it's plausible that the varicella-zoster virus – the virus behind shingles which also causes chickenpox in children and subsequently lies dormant in your nervous system for decades – could be reactivating as our immune systems weaken with age, with damaging consequences for the brain. 'There is suggestive evidence for the role of this virus in both vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease,' he says. Dr Geldsetzer's research has thrown up an additional finding – the protective effect of shingles vaccination seems to be much greater in women compared with men. 'This could be due to sex differences in the immune response, with women on average having higher antibody responses to vaccination,' Dr Geldsetzer suggests. 'But it could also be the way in which dementia develops. We know that both shingles and dementia are more common in women than men.' 2. Statins Statins are not the most popular of drugs, with people often voicing concerns about developing muscle and joint pain, but a major new study from South Korea has indicated an additional motivation to take them. Based on health data from more than 570,000 Koreans, it showed that the cholesterol-lowering drugs reduced dementia risk by 13 per cent, even in people with relatively low levels of LDL or 'bad' cholesterol. According to Dr Francesco Tamagnini, a dementia expert at the University of Reading, this may point to an emerging theory which could be linked to many cases of Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. Called 'the lipid invasion model' of Alzheimer's, the idea is that the blood-brain barrier, the layer of cells which separate the brain from the circulation, becomes more permeable with age. This may be a consequence of a lifetime's excessive drinking for example, or repeated head traumas incurred through sport or accidents. This increased permeability allows LDL cholesterol molecules to pass over from the blood into the brain, instigating cell damage. 'The brain has zero tolerance for LDL,' says Dr Tamagnini. 'The brain contains a lot of cholesterol, but it's mainly the high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol particles which are smaller. But if the larger LDL particles get in, that disrupts neuronal function. So this is an idea for why drugs like statins, which reduce the amount of LDL in the blood, will lower risk.' 3. Viagra If you're a regular Viagra user, it could be doing far more than just boosting your erections. Last summer, a new study revealed that Viagra can increase blood flow in both large and small blood vessels in the brain, as measured through ultrasound and MRI scans, and it appears to lower blood vessel resistance, something which contributes to the development of vascular dementia. 'It could be beneficial through reversing the small blood vessel dysfunction that occurs with age and is the most common cause of vascular dementia,' says Alastair Webb, a NHS consultant neurologist who led the study and a researcher at Imperial College London. 'By dilating smaller blood vessels, it could also help to reduce the stress on big blood vessels and reverse their increasing stiffness [with age].' Erectile dysfunction drugs may even offer wider benefits for other dementias. A major Phase 3 clinical trial called POLARIS-AD is currently testing a drug called AR1001 in patients with early Alzheimer's disease. Made by a company called AriBio, the drug is currently approved in South Korea for erectile dysfunction. While blood vessel problems are also thought to be involved in Alzheimer's disease, Dr Tamagnini says that erectile dysfunction drugs can also increase production of a powerful hormone called nitric oxide. 'This is actually involved in the brain in memory consolidation,' he says. 'If I had to bet a pint on why Viagra and these other drugs can lower risk of dementia, I would put it on nitric oxide, and that somehow promotes the formation of new memories.' 4. Ozempic Could semaglutide be the wonder drug of the decade? As well as being a potentially game-changing weight loss medication, there are some very real suggestions that semaglutide – marketed as Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for obesity – could help lower risk of Alzheimer's disease. The hype stems from two remarkable studies released last summer. The first found that diabetes patients taking semaglutide had a much lower risk of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia compared with those on a different diabetes drug called sitgliptin. The second found that Alzheimer's patients who received daily injections of liraglutide – a similar drug to semaglutide which also mimics the GLP-1 gut hormone – over the course of a year, had 50 per cent less brain shrinkage than those receiving a placebo. According to Imperial College London neuroscience professor Paul Edison, the brain protective effects of semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs are about more than just weight loss. Edison explains that there are multiple cell types in the brain to which these drugs are capable of binding, and animal studies suggest that they're capable of removing toxic proteins and stimulating neurons to repair themselves. 'We think it's quite a neuroprotective drug,' says Edison. 'It seems to activate different cascades of enzymes, and that reduces inflammation and eventually increases memory.' We should soon have even more concrete evidence. Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has initiated two Phase 3 studies, called evoke and evoke+, which have been running across 40 countries for more than three years, to see whether semaglutide has a positive effect on early Alzheimer's disease. Results are expected next year. 5. BCG vaccine It turns out that shingles is not the only vaccine which could make a difference. A study which saw scientists mine health data from more than 130 million individuals in the search for drugs with dementia-protecting qualities, highlighted the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis as a possible way of staving off cognitive decline. However, Dr Ben Underwood, a researcher in old age psychiatry at the University of Cambridge who authored the study, says that he's not convinced that there's a direct line between the tuberculosis bacterium and dementia. Instead, he suspects that the vaccine, which was first used medically in 1921 and most people are eligible to receive on the NHS, is having a wider immune-boosting effect. 'Maybe there's a more general effect of vaccination which gears up your immune system and gives you some more protection,' says Dr Underwood.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Dementia risk could dip with common vaccine, study suggests
The link between the zoster vaccine and a lower dementia risk has been strengthened in new research. A study by Stanford Medicine, published in the journal Nature on April 2, found that the vaccine — which is used to prevent shingles — reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis by about 20% over the next seven years. "If these findings are truly causal, the zoster vaccine will be both far more effective and cost-effective in preventing or delaying dementia than existing pharmaceutical interventions," the researchers noted in the study. New Blood Test Diagnoses Alzheimer's Disease And Measures How Far It's Progressed These findings also support an emerging theory that viruses impacting the nervous system can increase dementia risk. Senior study author Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, said he considers these findings "hugely important" for clinical medicine, population health and research. Read On The Fox News App "For the first time, we now have evidence that likely shows a cause-and-effect relationship between shingles vaccination and dementia prevention," he told Fox News Digital. "We find these protective effects to be large in size – substantially larger than those of existing pharmacological tools for dementia." The randomized trial took advantage of the unique way the zoster vaccine was rolled out in Wales, U.K., in 2013, Geldsetzer noted. Two Alzheimer's Drugs Help Patients Live Independently At Home For Longer Periods "They said that if you had your 80th birthday just prior to the start date of the program, you are ineligible, and you remain ineligible for life," he said. "If you had your 80th birthday just after, you were eligible for at least one year." "We see in our data that just a one-week difference across this date-of-birth cutoff means that you go from essentially no one getting vaccinated to about half of the population getting vaccinated." Both the vaccine-eligible and ineligible groups are "good comparison groups," according to Geldsetzer, since the only difference is that they were born a few days earlier or later. The same protective effect of shingles vaccination for dementia has been identified in different populations and countries that rolled out the vaccine in a similar way, the researcher revealed. Experimental Women's Cancer Drug Boosts Survival Rates In Notable Study To gather more evidence and confirm the link, Geldsetzer recommends conducting a clinical trial. "I'm currently trying to raise funds to conduct such a trial from private foundations and philanthropy," he said. "We want to trial the live-attenuated vaccine (the vaccine for which we have generated our compelling body of evidence), which is no longer being manufactured in the U.S." Family physician Dr. Mark Loafman, who was not involved in the study, weighed in on the association between the shingles vaccine and dementia risk. "We commonly see intriguing headlines from studies showing an association between a particular health outcome and exposure to something in the environment, our diet or medication," the Chicago doctor said in an interview with Fox News Digital. "The challenge when interpreting this type of data is that an association is in no way proof that the exposure is what caused the health finding." Click Here To Sign Up For Our Health Newsletter Loafman said this large-population study does a "very good job" of excluding the possibility that the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups share different attributes that could skew the outcome. "So, it really does look like the vaccine does indeed offer a fairly significant level of protection against developing dementia." "The study also includes compelling evidence to support two highly plausible mechanisms … in which the vaccine decreases the incidence of dementia," he added. This includes the fact that the herpes virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles, settles into the nervous system and lies dormant, which can ignite shingles later. For more Health articles, visit "Secondly, the live-attenuated vaccines, like the shingles vaccine, are associated with neuroprotective properties," Loafman went on. "The association is not in itself causal, but this study adds a lot more credibility to this association." Loafman, who has already received the shingles vaccine himself, said he will recommend it to patients in light of this research. "These findings bring even more encouragement for me to recommend it to my eligible patients, friends and family," he article source: Dementia risk could dip with common vaccine, study suggests
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Shingles vaccine may lower dementia risk, study suggests
(NewsNation) — The shingles vaccine may help protect against dementia, reducing the risk by 20% over seven years for older adults, a new study published in the journal Nature suggests. Researchers tracked people in Wales who were around 80 years old when they received the first-generation shingles vaccine, Zostavax, more than a decade ago. Now, Americans 50 and older are urged to get the newer, more effective vaccine, Shingrix. 'It's a very robust finding,' said Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University, the study's lead researcher. And 'women seem to benefit more,' which is important as they're at higher risk of dementia. Staff working on childhood lead exposure, cancer clusters fired Geldsetzer analyzed a 'natural experiment' in Wales to explore the potential impact of the vaccine on dementia risk. Those who were 80 or older on September 1, 2023, were ineligible, while those who were 79 could still get vaccinated. By comparing seniors who narrowly missed the cutoff, the researcher mimicked the conditions of a randomized clinical trial. The study analyzed 280,000 medical records, showing that Zostavax vaccine offered some protection against dementia. Future research will test if Shingrix has similar effects. Shingles, caused by the chickenpox virus, results in painful blisters and can lead to long-lasting nerve pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 1 in 3 Americans will get shingles with complications like vision loss or chronic pain, per the CDC. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Independent
03-04-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Shingles vaccine can slash risk of dementia, study suggests
Researchers tracking dementia cases in UK adults have discovered the shingles vaccine could cut the risk of patients developing the disease. Health data of more than 280,000 adults revealed adults who received a discontinued shingles vaccine called Zostavax were 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia over a period of seven years than those who did not. In the study led by Stanford Medicine, published in the journal Nature, researchers took advantage of a vaccine roll out that took place in Wales in 2013. Shingles, a viral infection that produces a painful rash, is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox. After people contract chicken pox the virus stays dormant and in older or have weakened immune systems, the dormant virus can reactivate and cause shingles. The vaccination program, which began in September 2013, specified that anyone aged 79 was able to get the vaccine for one year. Researchers focused their analysis on those closest to either side of the eligibility threshold — comparing people who turned 80 in the week before with those who turned 80 in the week after. Over the next seven years, the two groups were compared and found the vaccine reduced the occurrence of shingles by about 37 per cent over a period of seven years. By 2020, one in eight older adults, who were by then 86 and 87, had been diagnosed with dementia. But those who received the shingles vaccine were 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia than the unvaccinated. This finding supported the emerging theory that viruses which affect the nervous system can increase the risk of dementia and suggests a preventative measure for the memory robbing disease is already close at hand. 'It was a really striking finding,' Pascal Geldsetzer assistant professor of medicine and senior author of the new study said. 'This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data.' The study also showed that protection against dementia was much more pronounced in women than in men, which Geldsetzer suggested could be because women have higher antibody responses to vaccination and shingles is more common in women than in men. Whether the vaccine protects against dementia by revving up the immune system overall, by specifically reducing reactivations of the virus or by some other mechanism is still unknown. In the past two years, his team has replicated the Wales findings in health records from other countries, including England, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, that had similar rollouts of the vaccine. 'We just keep seeing this strong protective signal for dementia in dataset after dataset,' he said. Professor Anthony Hannan, Group Head of the Epigenetics and Neural Plasticity Group at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, said: 'It is possible that the vaccine had direct effects on these brain immune cells, but it is also possible that the vaccine acted indirectly, for example, by slowing brain aging and/or enhancing brain resilience to the ravages of age. 'The next step is to work out exactly how this vaccine exerts its protective effects against dementia and to use that information to develop new ways to prevent and treat dementia. It also increases the likelihood that in future there may be specific vaccination programs whose primary aim is to prevent dementia.'
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
This Vaccine is Linked to a Lower Risk of Developing Dementia
While there are many theories about what causes Alzheimer's disease, one of the most well-known points to proteins called amyloid plaques. These sticky clumps are thought to build up in the brain, blocking communication between brain cells and eventually causing them to die. But not all scientists are convinced this theory tells the whole story. In fact, a lesser-known idea is now gaining serious attention—thanks to a new study. 🩺SIGN UP for tips to stay healthy & fit with the top moves, clean eats, health trends & more delivered right to your inbox twice a week💊 Published today inNature, the study found the strongest evidence yet linking certain viruses to dementia. The good news? We may already have a vaccine that could help prevent it. Related: According to the study, older adults who had the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years compared to people without the vaccine. According to the authors, this surprising finding could be the key to preventing dementia. 'It was a really striking finding,' said , an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine and senior study author. 'This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data.' Shingles is a viral infection that creates a painful, itchy rash. The virus behind shingles, varicella-zoster, is the same virus that causes chickenpox. The virus does not clear away after chickenpox; it stays in the body for the rest of your life. However, the varicella-zoster virus is always at risk of reactivating and causing shingles. One in three Americans will develop shingles, though the risk is even higher among older adults or those with weakened immune systems. According to the study, people vaccinated against shingles had a 37% lower risk of shingles seven years after vaccination. The finding is similar to what is seen in clinical trials since the effectiveness of the shingles vaccine wanes over time. Related: For some time, scientists have suspected shingles is involved in the development of dementia. In 2024, researchers found that having a single case of shingles was associated with a20% higher riskof long-term cognitive decline. Likewise, past studies have linked the shingles vaccine with a 17% lower risk of dementia and 164 additional days without living with a diagnosis for those who eventually got it. However, bias hampered researchers from confirming the vaccine's dementia-reducing effect. Namely, vaccinated people were usually more health conscious, so it's possible other behaviors like diet and exercise influenced their risk of dementia as well. 'All these associational studies suffer from the basic problem that people who get vaccinated have different health behaviors than those who don't,' said Geldsetzer. 'In general, they're seen as not being solid enough evidence to make any recommendations on.' It was an accident turned opportunity for dementia researchers. To ration the shingle vaccine supply, Wales offered vaccinations only for people aged 79. The offer was only for one year; afterward, only the 78-year-olds turning 79 would be eligible next year. Geldsetzer considered the 2013 policy change as close to a randomized clinical trial—the gold standard for experiments—as possible. 'What makes the study so powerful is that it's essentially like a randomized trial with a control group—those a little bit too old to be eligible for the vaccine—and an intervention group—those just young enough to be eligible,' he said. Scientists were now in a position to study the vaccine effects by comparing dementia rates among 80-year-olds just before the policy shift (and ineligible for vaccination) and those who turned 80 afterward. 'We know that if you take a thousand people at random born in one week and a thousand people at random born a week later, there shouldn't be anything different about them on average,' Geldsetzer explained. 'They are similar to each other apart from this tiny difference in age.' For over seven years, the researchers looked at the health records of over 280,000 older adults, paying close attention to those one week apart from turning 80. One in eight older adults, now 86 and 87, were diagnosed with dementia. People vaccinated against shingles had a 20% lower chance of developing dementia compared to the unvaccinated. No other factors, such as level of education or health conditions, explained the dementia risk difference—just the vaccine. 'The signal in our data was so strong, so clear and so persistent,' Geldsetzer said. The authors suggest the shingles vaccine possibly reduces dementia by providing a broader immune response or by stopping the dormant virus from reactivating. Related: How Vision Loss Can Predict Dementia 12 Years Earlier The vaccine appeared to be more effective in protecting women than men against dementia. According to Geldsetzer, the differences in vaccine response could come from women typically having high antibody responses to vaccination, especially as shingles is more common in women than men. Another explanation is that dementia might develop differently in women than men—a theory still under investigation. The next step for researchers is a larger clinical trial to see the effects of the shingles vaccine on dementia and how it preserves cognition. In the meantime, people don't have to wait 10 or 20 years for ways to prevent dementia. A shingles vaccine is already available. Up Next:"A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia." Nature. Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, Ph.D, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine "About Shingles (Herpes Zoster)." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Herpes zoster and long-term risk of subjective cognitive decline." Alzheimer's Research & Therapy. "The recombinant shingles vaccine is associated with lower risk of dementia." Nature Medicine.
