An elixir for keeping our brains and bodies younger may already be sitting on pharmacy shelves across the United States — if only we'd take advantage of it.
I'm talking about the shingles vaccine.
It was invented because, well, shingles is a terrible disease. If you ever had chickenpox (like I did), this virus is lurking inside your body already. Shingles is the reactivation of the same varicella zoster virus later in life. It can lead to painful red rashes that last for weeks, and for some people, they will suffer from debilitating nerve pain for the rest of their lives.
The debut of the first shingles shot in 2006 was a big public health win for that reason alone. But the benefits may be even greater than we realized at the time.
Over the past year, there has been a steady stream of studies showing that the shingles vaccine doesn't just stop the painful skin rashes — it could also stave off dementia and slow our biological aging.
A recent study that tracked specific biomarkers in human samples strengthened the case that there is a genuine cause-and-effect. The science surrounding the shingles vaccine is a new window into how we age and how we might even slow it down. These findings could open doors to powerful new anti-aging, anti-dementia treatments.
But that will require more investment — and researchers working on these projects told me it's been surprisingly hard to find the necessary financial support. Just as importantly, we need to get more seniors to take the vaccine: As of now, less than a third of eligible Americans over 50 are getting their shingles jab.
The remarkable anti-aging shingles shot
The first shingles vaccine, released in 2006, decreased the risk of shingles by 60 percent and also reduced by two-thirds the risk of long-term nerve pain. Experts said at the time that the shot "represents a major public health advance."
But it was only within the last year that the awesome dementia-defeating powers of the shingles vaccine started to come into focus.
Pascal Geldsetzer, who researches population health at Stanford University, spotted an opportunity: In 2013, Wales had established new standards for who could receive the shingles vaccine. People who were born before September 2, 1933, were not eligible, and everyone born on that day or after was. There were two large groups of people who were otherwise the same, differing in age by only weeks, except one of them had received the shingles shot and the other had not. It's about as rigorous a "natural experiment" as you could hope for. And so a few years ago, Geldsetzer and his co-authors looked back at the country's comprehensive health records to track what had happened to patients after they received a shingles vaccine (or didn't).
And the results, published in April 2025, were striking: Receiving the shingles vaccine was associated with a 20-percent lower chance of being diagnosed with dementia. Those findings held up to all kinds of veracity checks — and they were repeated in similar natural experiments in Australia and Canada (the latter also co-authored by Geldsetzer). A December 2025 study based on the same Welsh data concluded that people who already had dementia and received the shingles vaccine saw slower progression of the disease and fewer deaths, suggesting that the shot may be effective in treating dementia, too.
So the circumstantial case for the shingles shot has grown robust — and now we're starting to get lab-based research that could explain why this is happening.
A recent study analyzed biomarker data from blood samples collected by the US government as part of regular surveys monitoring Americans' health. Whereas the earlier studies were observational, this was an attempt by scientists to actually see what was happening — to measure changes in the body at the molecular level. The researchers found that the vaccine was associated with slower overall biological aging, lower inflammation, and less cell damage. The findings fit with what we're learning about how chronic inflammation may slowly damage the body over time, leading to various chronic health problems.
The study did leave one mystery: The biomarkers specifically linked to dementia did not actually decrease. But the authors noted that we're still figuring out how to understand the relationship between brain biomarkers and disease. It is possible, for example, that less systemic inflammation leads to less dementia without specifically altering the biomarkers that were tracked.
But now money is drying up for vaccine research
The existing research largely focuses on the initial vaccine released. But in 2018, an even better version came on the market.
Shingrix, which combined virus proteins with an immunity booster, prevented shingles in more than 90 percent of cases in clinical trials, with similar success in preventing nerve damage. It is now the standard vaccine in the US.
But does Shingrix have the same anti-aging effects? Unfortunately, we just don't know. We need more research — and that's where all this promising news runs into a brick wall.
Ideally, researchers would run randomized clinical trials. But despite these amazing findings, Geldsetzer told me he had been struggling to find financial support to study Shingrix.
"I think to really convince the public health and medical community what we need now is a true clinical trial, a randomized trial on the effect of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention and cognition," Geldsetzer said. "There's little commercial interest. It's not been easy at all."
A number of things are working against him and his peers. The initial Welsh research was supported by an NIH grant, but pro-vaccine research does not exactly align with the administration's priorities under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s leadership. Drug manufacturers have also been pulling out of the vaccine business for years, a trend that is getting worse under the Trump administration.
There is a bitter irony here.
The shingles vaccine was made possible because pharmaceutical companies, philanthropy groups, and national governments invested in a new vaccine platform while searching for a malaria shot, just one of many examples of how scientific investment can pay off in unexpected ways. But now, money is short.
Let's not miss this tremendous health care opportunity
To maximize the shingles vaccine's value, we need more research, and we need more people to take it. Vaccination rates are still surprisingly low: Only 30 percent of eligible patients received the shingles shot as of 2022.
Lower vaccination rates among men, underrepresented and historically marginalized groups, and lower-income people suggest this is partly a health care access issue. (Adding to that evidence: People without chronic conditions are also less likely to get it, probably because they have less contact with the health system.)
But on top of that, we're now entering a new era of vaccine hesitancy, even among older people. Vaccination rates among seniors for pneumonia and flu have been dropping.
This is a big public health test: We seem to have a cheap intervention for aging and cognitive decline.
In a more pro-vaccine alternate reality, we might even be pondering questions like: Should even younger people get it? Shingles has grown increasingly common among people in their 30s and 40s, and given the studies so far have found the shot's anti-aging effects persist for years, the long-term payoff could be immense.
Those are the policy challenges. At the personal level, what each of us can do is talk to the seniors in our lives; a lot of them aren't getting vaccinated. Shingles sucks — and the shot for it might also stave off dementia and slow your body's aging. Win-win-win.
