Could the shingles vaccine help you live a healthier life as you age?
Researchers are getting closer to answering that question, with a new study offering evidence that the vaccine may not just protect against the painful viral shingles illness - but that it may also support a longer “health span” by slowing biological aging.
“Vaccines may do more than prevent acute infections. Our findings suggest the shingles vaccine may support healthier aging by slowing some underlying biological processes tied to aging,” says the study author Jung ki Kim,PhD,a research assistant professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
How Different Aspects of Biological Aging Are Measured
Researchers analyzed health data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, which included data from more than 3,800 adults ages 70 and older in 2016. They measured seven different aspects of biological aging to come up with a composite biological aging score, including:
- Inflammation
- Innate immunity, the body’s natural defense system against infection
- adaptive immunity, the body’s learned defense system after exposure to vaccination or infection
- Blood flow
- Neurodegeneration, the deterioration of nerve cells in the brain
- Epigenetic aging, changes in how genes are expressed (turned “off” or “on”)
- Transcriptomic aging, gene responses that mark biological age
They found that people who received the shingles vaccine after age 60 showed evidence of slower biological aging on average, compared with those who were unvaccinated. This link remained even after accounting for race and ethnicity, income levels, and health differences between the two groups.
Why would the Shingles Vaccine Slow Biological Aging?
In the study, participants who got a shingles vaccine had significantly lower markers of inflammation and slower epigenetic and transcriptomic aging, along with a lower composite biological aging score.
Biological aging reflects how well your body is functioning, not just how old you are in years, Dr. Kim explains. “Two people the same age can have very different biological ages depending on inflammation, immune health, molecular, and othre processes.”
As chronic, low-level inflammation has been shown to contribute to age-related health conditions, some experts have coined the term “inflammaging,” or inflammation linked to aging – which vaccination appears to help combat.
