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Vaccination against herpes zoster (shingles) appears not only to protect against the acute effects of the disease but also to substantially lower the risk of developing dementia. This conclusion is drawn from a natural experiment analyzing health outcomes following the introduction of the shingles vaccination program in Wales in 2013. Researchers at the Department of Business and Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) played a central role in evaluating the vaccination’s long-term impact, applying advanced empirical methods from economics to public health data.

“We were able to apply rigorous statistical tools from our field to large-scale medical data, effectively bridging economics and epidemiology,” explains Dr. Markus Eyting, lead author of this study and researcher at the Department of Business and Economics at JGU Mainz.

In the article "A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia," published in Nature, Dr. Eyting, together with co-lead author Dr. Min Xie (postdoctoral fellow at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health), and researchers from WU Vienna and Stanford University, estimates that receiving the shingles vaccine reduces dementia diagnoses by 20% over a seven-year follow-up period.

This interdisciplinary study highlights the untapped potential of vaccination programs in mitigating the burden of neurodegenerative diseases and demonstrates how causal inference methods from economics can generate robust evidence for public health policy.

Press release

The Department of Business & Economics is inviting you to the online information event for the Master of Science program in Quantitative Decision Making in Economics and Management (QDEM).

Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 at 14:00-15:00
via MS Teams

On November 6, 2024, from 9:00 to 15:30, the Study Abroad Fair will take place again in the foyer of the new ReWi Building.

There, you can learn about various international opportunities offered by FB03 and the International Office.

Participants include:

• ERASMUS+ Office Wirtschaftswissenschaften (information on partner universities, application procedures...)
• International Office Department of Business & Economics (international programs in economics, double degree programs...)
• EU-ServicePoint (ERASMUS+ internships)
• Abteilung Internationales (International Office JGU) (ERASMUS+, non-European programs, PROMOS, FORTHEM,...)