Latest news with #PascalGeldsetzer
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.
Euronews
05-04-2025
- Health
- Euronews
Shingles vaccine tied to a 20% lower risk of dementia among older people
ADVERTISEMENT Older adults who got the shingles vaccine may be at significantly lower risk of developing dementia, a new study in Wales has found. The study, which was published in the journal Nature , included about 283,000 older adults who were either deemed eligible or not to receive the shingles jab due to a quirk in Welsh vaccine policy. In 2013, Wales' government made 79-year-olds eligible for the shingles vaccine, and from then on, people aged into the programme when they turned 79. But due to limited supplies, adults who were 80 or older at the time were never offered the jab. Researchers from the US, Germany, and Austria homed in on people who turned 80 the week before the vaccine eligibility cutoff and compared them to those who turned 80 the following week. About half of those who were eligible got the vaccine. Related EU regulators block new Alzheimer's drug citing potentially fatal side effects After seven years, about one in eight people who did not get the vaccine had dementia. But those who got the jab were 20 per cent less likely to be diagnosed, the study found. The effects were much stronger among women than men. "It was a really striking finding," Dr Pascal Geldsetzer, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University in the US, said in a statement. "This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data". Other studies have also suggested that the shingles vaccine could help keep dementia at bay. Last year, an analysis published in Nature Medicine showed that people who got a newer version of the shingles vaccine were at significantly lower risk of developing dementia in the six years after they were immunised. The two vaccines are made differently. The newer, more common jab contains a protein from the varicella zoster virus, which causes both chickenpox and shingles. The vaccine in the Welsh study used a weakened live version of the virus. Related Confronting 14 risk factors could delay or prevent nearly half of dementia cases, experts say In 2023, the UK phased out the live virus vaccine in favor of the newer jab from the drugmaker GSK because it appears to provide protection from shingles over a longer period of time. People can develop shingles – a painful rash of fluid-filled blisters that can take weeks to clear up – years after getting chickenpox if the dormant virus is reactivated. Older people and those with weakened immune systems are at higher risk. Both recent studies were natural experiments that are fairly similar to randomised trials, which are the gold standard for medical research. Because of the eligibility criteria for the shingles jab, the researchers were able to compare two otherwise similar groups of people, allowing them to identify the likely impact of vaccination. ADVERTISEMENT "What makes the study so powerful is that it's essentially like a randomised 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," Geldsetzer said. Questions remain to prove causation The studies indicate that regardless of the type of jab, the shingles vaccine could offer some protection against dementia – though more research is needed to prove it. Related Experimental drug may slow dementia onset for patients with rare genetic form of Alzheimer's It also isn't clear what's driving the link. Geldsetzer's team said viruses that affect the nervous system may raise the risk of dementia, but the theory needs to be tested. Meanwhile, the disparity between women and men might be explained by differences in their immune systems, given they respond differently to infections and vaccinations, according to Dr Maxime Taquet, a clinical lecturer at Oxford University in the UK who led the 2024 study. ADVERTISEMENT "Even though this remains kind of hypothetical, we think this is playing a part in why we see a difference in men and women," Taquet told Euronews Health. To help solidify the evidence, the drugmaker GSK said last week that it is studying data from about 1.4 million older adults in the United Kingdom, some of whom got its shingles vaccine and some of whom did not. Similarly to the Welsh policy change, in 2023, the UK expanded its shingles vaccination programme from adults 70 and older to adults 65 and up – but those aged 66 to 69 at the time were told they had to wait until they were 70 to get the jab. Related Loneliness increases dementia risk by over 30%, new global analysis shows In another natural experiment, researchers will track whether they develop dementia symptoms. ADVERTISEMENT The recent findings on shingles vaccination could represent a new frontier for Alzheimer's research, which for decades has struggled to produce breakthroughs in prevention or new treatments. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, which affects 7 million people in Europe, according to estimates from the European Brain Council. "Dementia is such a huge burden," Taquet said. "By triggering the right immune pathways in people, we might be able to reduce or even reverse the dementia process," he added. ADVERTISEMENT "There's many, many steps between where we are now and actually getting there, but I think this is an exciting new lead in this area".
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.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Could the Shingles Vaccine Help Prevent Dementia?
Credit - Getty Images If your doctor told you that a vaccine against dementia was available, would you be interested? According to a study published April 2 in the journal Nature by researchers in the U.S. and Germany, this question might not be hypothetical anymore. The varicella-zoster virus—which causes varicella (chickenpox) in childhood and zoster (shingles) after lying dormant in nerve cells and re-activating later in life—is one virus that scientists have hypothesized can cause dementia, because it infects the nervous system. We have vaccines against both conditions. The chickenpox vaccine protects children from the initial viral infection, and the separate shingles vaccine prevents the virus from reactivating in previously infected adults (which is most adults born before widespread chickenpox vaccination began in the late 1990s), stopping it from causing the painful shingles rash. The traditional way to find out if vaccinating adults against this virus could prevent dementia later in life would be to conduct a randomized controlled trial. We'd take a group of adults and randomly divide them into two groups: the 'control' group that would get no vaccine, and the 'intervention' group that would get the vaccine. Then, we'd look to see if there was a difference in rates of dementia between the two groups over time. The problem here is that because dementia is a disease of old age, we'd have to closely follow thousands of patients, collecting health information over many years—which is no simple task. The researchers behind this new study, including Markus Eyting and Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University, didn't do any of this, though. They were clever enough to realize this experiment had already happened—purely by accident—yet its results remained a mystery waiting to be uncovered. Back in 2013, the government of Wales decided that it would begin providing the zoster vaccine to prevent shingles in adults born on or after September 2, 1933, while those older than that would not be eligible. Someone who was born on September 4, 1933 could get the vaccine, while someone born just a week earlier on August 28, 1933 was ineligible. Read More: The New CDC Study on Vaccines and Autism Should Take a Radical Approach Since the precise week we're born is arbitrary, Welsh adults born just before versus just after the cutoff were similar to one another except for whether or not they were eligible to receive the vaccine. They were essentially randomized to either get the shingles vaccine or not. This phenomenon of patients getting accidentally randomized to one treatment or another is called a natural experiment—science happening 'in the wild' without any researcher guiding it. Natural experiments like this one happen all the time, but they often go unnoticed unless researchers unearth them from existing data. Since years had passed since the vaccination program launched, researchers could look at health records of Welsh adults to see who developed dementia and who didn't since 2013. What they found was astounding. Because they were ineligible, almost nobody born just before the cutoff got the shingles vaccine. Meanwhile, about half of those born just after the cutoff received the vaccine, and accordingly, they had lower rates of shingles (because the primary benefit of the vaccine is to reduce the risk of developing shingles). But surprisingly, those who were eligible for vaccination also had a significantly lower rate of being diagnosed with dementia. The researchers estimated a nearly 20% reduction in dementia diagnosis among those who were, by chance, vaccinated. As remarkable as this analysis was, it doesn't tell us exactly why the shingles vaccine may have led to lower rates of dementia diagnosis. The most obvious explanation would be that if the reactivation of the virus during a shingles episode predisposes someone to developing dementia, preventing reactivation with the vaccine would reduce the risk of developing dementia. The researchers found evidence supporting this hypothesis. First, those who had more shingles episodes (and thus more viral reactivations) had higher rates of dementia. And second, they found that those who received antiviral medication for shingles episodes—which helps shut down the reactivation—had lower rates of dementia compared to those who didn't get an antiviral medication. Read More: Why Do Taxi Drivers Have a Lower Risk of Alzheimer's? Another explanation could be that there's something about the body's response to the vaccine itself that protects against dementia. Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system, and that immune response could theoretically impact the brain in a way that reduces dementia risk. Researchers found two pieces of evidence suggesting this may be a factor. First, they found that those who had recently received a flu vaccine when they received their shingles vaccine were even more protected against dementia than those who only got the shingles vaccine. Second, they decided to look at differences between men and women, who have been shown to have different immune responses to vaccines. (Women may have stronger immune responses to vaccination than men). They found that the protective effect against dementia was much larger among women than men. Any number of these mechanisms could explain the shingles vaccine's potential protective effect against dementia. (One of us, Jena, explored these in depth in a commentary published in Nature alongside the study.) Clearly there's more research to do to fully understand what's happening here, but this study has provided a new road map to guide future investigation. This advance in our understanding of the zoster vaccine, shingles, and dementia wouldn't have happened without these researchers recognizing the conditions for a natural experiment in Wales and carefully analyzing the data to understand what happened to these patients who, by chance, received the zoster vaccine. In an age where data are collected in nearly every aspect of our lives, troves of natural experiments in health care are waiting to be uncovered—as long as researchers have the opportunity and resources to find and analyze them. Contact us at letters@
