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).
References
World Health Organization. Dementia (WHO, 2025).
2024 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures. Alzheimers Dement 20, 3708–3821 (2024).
GBD 2019 Dementia Forecasting Collaborators. Estimation of the global prevalence of dementia in 2019 and forecasted prevalence in 2050: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Lancet Public Health 7, e105–e125 (2022).
Gao, J. et al. The association between varicella zoster virus and dementia: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. Neurol. Sci. 45, 27–36 (2024).
Wainberg, M. et al. The viral hypothesis: how herpesviruses may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. Mol. Psychiatry 26, 5476–5480 (2021).
Devanand, D. P. Viral hypothesis and antiviral treatment in Alzheimer’s disease. Curr. Neurol. Neurosci. Rep. 18, 55 (2018).
Moir, R. D., Lathe, R. & Tanzi, R. E. The antimicrobial protection hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimers Dement 14, 1602–1614 (2018).
Itzhaki, R. F. et al. Microbes and Alzheimer’s disease. J. Alzheimers Dis. 51, 979–984 (2016).
Hyde, V. R. et al. Anti-herpetic tau preserves neurons via the cGAS-STING-TBK1 pathway in Alzheimer’s disease. Cell Rep. 44, 115109 (2025).
Gershon, A. A. et al. Varicella zoster virus infection. Nat. Rev. Dis. Prim. 1, 15016 (2015).
Steiner, I., Kennedy, P. G. & Pachner, A. R. The neurotropic herpes viruses: herpes simplex and varicella-zoster. Lancet Neurol. 6, 1015–1028 (2007).
Thapa, S. et al. Risk of dementia following herpes zoster infection among patients undertreatment versus those not: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Sci. Rep. 7, e1941 (2024).
Chen, V. C. et al. Herpes zoster and dementia: a nationwide population-based cohort study. J. Clin. Psychiatry 79, 16m11312 (2018).
Bae, S. et al. Association of herpes zoster with dementia and effect of antiviral therapy on dementia: a population-based cohort study. Eur. Arch. Psychiatry Clin. Neurosci. 271, 987–997 (2021).
Zhang, Y., Liu, W. & Xu, Y. Association between herpes zoster and Parkinson’s disease and dementia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Front. Neurol. 15, 1471736 (2024).
Levine, K. S. et al. Virus exposure and neurodegenerative disease risk across national biobanks. Neuron 111, 1086–1093.e1082 (2023).
Cairns, D. M., Itzhaki, R. F. & Kaplan, D. L. Potential involvement of varicella zoster virus in Alzheimer’s disease via reactivation of quiescent herpes simplex virus type 1. J. Alzheimers Dis. 88, 1189–1200 (2022).
Anwar, M. M. The emerging mechanism behind viral infections and extracellular vesicles hypotheses leading to neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Ibrain 9, 63–71 (2023).
Bronzuoli, M. R., Iacomino, A., Steardo, L. & Scuderi, C. Targeting neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s disease. J. Inflamm. Res. 9, 199–208 (2016).
Gilden, D., Cohrs, R. J., Mahalingam, R. & Nagel, M. A. Varicella zoster virus vasculopathies: diverse clinical manifestations, laboratory features, pathogenesis, and treatment. Lancet Neurol. 8, 731–740 (2009).
Lehrer, S. & Rheinstein, P. H. Herpes zoster vaccination reduces risk of dementia. Vivo 35, 3271–3275 (2021).
Lophatananon, A. et al. Shingles, Zostavax vaccination and risk of developing dementia: a nested case-control study-results from the UK Biobank cohort. BMJ Open 11, e045871 (2021).
Scherrer, J. F. et al. Impact of herpes zoster vaccination on incident dementia: a retrospective study in two patient cohorts. PLoS ONE 16, e0257405 (2021).
Schnier, C., Janbek, J., Lathe, R. & Haas, J. Reduced dementia incidence after varicella zoster vaccination in Wales 2013-2020. Alzheimers Dement 8, e12293 (2022).
Remschmidt, C., Wichmann, O. & Harder, T. Frequency and impact of confounding by indication and healthy vaccinee bias in observational studies assessing influenza vaccine effectiveness: a systematic review. BMC Infect. Dis. 15, 429 (2015).
Ford, D. V. et al. The SAIL Databank: building a national architecture for e-health research and evaluation. BMC Health Serv. Res. 9, 157 (2009).
Eyting, M. et al. A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia. Nature 641, 438–446 (2025).
The Medical Letter. Herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax). Med. Lett. Drugs Ther. 48, 73–74 (2006).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What Everyone Should Know about Zostavax (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020).
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Approval letter - SHINGRIX. Vol. 2025. https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/shingrix (2017).
Lal, H. et al. Efficacy of an adjuvanted herpes zoster subunit vaccine in older adults. N. Engl. J. Med. 372, 2087–2096 (2015).
Cunningham, A. L. et al. Efficacy of the herpes zoster subunit vaccine in adults 70 years of age or older. N. Engl. J. Med. 375, 1019–1032 (2016).
Dooling, K. L. et al. Recommendations of the advisory committee on immunization practices for use of herpes zoster vaccines. MMWR Morb. Mortal. Wkly Rep. 67, 103–108 (2018).
Taquet, M., Dercon, Q., Todd, J. A. & Harrison, P. J. The recombinant shingles vaccine is associated with lower risk of dementia. Nat. Med. 30, 2777–2781 (2024).
Tang, E., Ray, I., Arnold, B. F. & Acharya, N. R. Recombinant zoster vaccine and the risk of dementia. Vaccine 46, 126673 (2025).
Liu, Y., Jun, H., Becker, A., Wallick, C. & Mattke, S. Detection rates of mild cognitive impairment in primary care for the United States Medicare population. J. Prev. Alzheimers Dis. 11, 7–12 (2024).
Mattke, S. et al. Expected and diagnosed rates of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in the U.S. Medicare population: observational analysis. Alzheimers Res Ther. 15, 128 (2023).
Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. Fast Facts. https://www.kp-scalresearch.org/aboutus/fast-facts/ (2024).
Chen, W. et al. Research data warehouse: using electronic health records to conduct population-based observational studies. JAMIA Open 6, ooad039 (2023).
Koebnick, C. et al. Sociodemographic characteristics of members of a large, integrated health care system: comparison with US Census Bureau data. Perm. J. 16, 37–41 (2012).
International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. Guidelines for Good Pharmacoepidemiology Practices (GPP) (Revision 3). https://www.pharmacoepi.org/resources/policies/guidelines-08027/Vol. 2025 (2015).
Austin, P. C. An introduction to propensity score methods for reducing the effects of confounding in observational studies. Multivar. Behav. Res. 46, 399–424 (2011).
Tartof, S. Y. et al. Safety of seasonal influenza vaccination in hospitalized surgical patients: a cohort study. Ann. Intern Med. 164, 593–599 (2016).
Salmon, D. A., Black, S., Didierlaurent, A. M. & Moulton, L. H. Commentary on “common vaccines and the risk of dementia: a population-based cohort study”: science can be messy but eventually leads to truths. J. Infect. Dis. 227, 1224–1226 (2023).
VanderWeele, T. J. & Ding, P. Sensitivity analysis in observational research: introducing the E-value. Ann. Intern Med. 167, 268–274 (2017).
Quan, H. et al. Updating and validating the Charlson comorbidity index and score for risk adjustment in hospital discharge abstracts using data from 6 countries. Am. J. Epidemiol. 173, 676–682 (2011).
Kim, D. H. et al. Measuring frailty in medicare data: development and validation of a claims-based frailty index. J. Gerontol. A Biol. Sci. Med. Sci. 73, 980–987 (2018).
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.
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.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Meeting(s) where the information has previously been presented
Findings from this study were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2025.
Trademark statement
Shingrix is a trademark owned by or licensed to GSK. Zostavax is a trademark of Merck.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
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
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69289-0