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.
