The hidden benefits of common vaccines, including reduced dementia and heart risks
Flu, RSV, shingles, Covid and other vaccines have ‘off-target’ benefits for older adults, making them ‘key tools’ for healthy ageing
Let us be clear: the primary reason to be vaccinated against shingles – a virus that causes a painful rash – is that two jabs provide at least 90 per cent protection against a painful, blistering disease that a third of people in America will suffer in their lifetimes, and a similar number in Hong Kong.
It can cause lingering nerve pain and other nasty long-term consequences.
Meanwhile, the most important reason for older adults to be vaccinated against RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) is that their risk of the infection hospitalising them declines by almost 70 per cent in the year they get the jab, and by nearly 60 per cent over two years.
And the main reason to roll up a sleeve for an annual flu vaccine is that when people do get infected, it reliably reduces the severity of illness – though its effectiveness varies by how well scientists have predicted which strain of influenza shows up.
But other reasons for older people to be vaccinated are emerging. They are known, in doctor-speak, as off-target benefits, meaning that the jabs do good things beyond preventing the diseases they were designed for.
The list of off-target benefits is lengthening as “the research has accumulated and accelerated over the last 10 years”, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Nashville, in the US state of Tennessee.