Recombinant zoster vaccine is associated with a reduced risk of dementia

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Data availability

Individual-level data are not publicly available due to privacy concerns and protection of patient identities. Requests for aggregate-level data may be submitted to KPSC and are subject to review. De-identified aggregate-level data that support the findings of this study may be shared upon approval of a proposal and a signed data access agreement.

Code availability

Epidemiological analyses were conducted using standard commands in SAS 9.4 (SAS Institute; Cary, North Carolina, USA).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported and funded by GSK. Medical writing assistance for the manuscript and coordination were provided by Akkodis Belgium c/o GSK. The authors would like to thank the patients of Kaiser Permanente for their partnership. Their information, collected through our electronic health record system, leads to findings that help us improve care for our patients and can be shared with the larger community.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Research & Evaluation, Kaiser Permanente Southern California, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Emily Rayens, Lina S. Sy, Lei Qian, Bradley K. Ackerson, Julia Tubert, Yi Luo, Punam P. Modha, Raul O. Calderon & Hung Fu Tseng

  2. GSK, Rockville, MD, USA

    Elizabeth Chmielewski-Yee, Driss Oraichi & Huifeng Yun

  3. GSK, Collegeville, PA, USA

    Carol Koro

  4. Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research, School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Carol Koro

  5. Department of Health Systems Science, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Hung Fu Tseng

Authors

  1. Emily Rayens
  2. Lina S. Sy
  3. Lei Qian
  4. Bradley K. Ackerson
  5. Julia Tubert
  6. Yi Luo
  7. Punam P. Modha
  8. Raul O. Calderon
  9. Elizabeth Chmielewski-Yee
  10. Driss Oraichi
  11. Huifeng Yun
  12. Carol Koro
  13. Hung Fu Tseng

Contributions

E.R. is the guarantor of the work and accepts full responsibility for the integrity of the study and the decision to publish. E.R., L.S.S., L.Q., B.K.A., J.T., Y.L., E.C-Y., D.O., H.Y., C.K., and H.F.T. designed and conducted this study, including interpretation of data. L.Q., J.T., and Y.L. performed statistical analysis. P.P.M. and R.O.C. provided administrative, technical, and material support. E.R. drafted the manuscript. All authors critically revised the manuscript and contributed to the final drafting. The corresponding author attests that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no others meeting the criteria have been omitted.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emily Rayens.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare the following competing interests: E.R., L.S.S., L.Q., B.K.A., Y.L., P.P.M., and H.F.T. received research funding from AstraZeneca. E.R., L.S.S., L.Q., B.K.A., J.T., Y.L., P.P.M., and H.F.T. received research funding from Moderna. ER and BKA received research funding from F2G, Inc. L.S.S., L.Q., and B.K.A. received research funding from Dynavax. B.K.A., J.T., and R.O.C. received research funding from Pfizer. B.K.A. received research funding from Genentech. E.R., L.S.S., L.Q., B.K.A., Y.L., P.P.M., and H.F.T. received research funding from GSK (unrelated to this study). E.C-Y., D.O., H.Y., and C.K. are employed by GSK and hold financial equities in GSK. The authors declare no other financial or non-financial interests.

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Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.

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Meeting(s) where the information has previously been presented

Findings from this study were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2025.

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Shingrix is a trademark owned by or licensed to GSK. Zostavax is a trademark of Merck.

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Rayens, E., Sy, L.S., Qian, L. et al. Recombinant zoster vaccine is associated with a reduced risk of dementia. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69289-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69289-0