Shingrix linked to 9% lower heart disease risk in study — SkimNews
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- Oxford researchers published a Nature Medicine study finding that the Shingrix recombinant shingles vaccine was associated with a 9% lower overall cardiovascular burden over seven years compared to the older Zostavax live vaccine, drawing on electronic health records of 72,000 people aged 60 and older from the TriNetX network of 60 health systems.
- Coronary heart disease fell 10%, heart failure fell 12%, and atrial fibrillation was 7% lower in the Shingrix cohort; strokes dropped 12% in men but showed no statistically significant reduction in women, translating in absolute terms to 1% fewer cardiovascular events over seven years.
- The team designed a "natural experiment" comparing people vaccinated six months before versus six months after Shingrix's October 2017 U.S. approval date, a method meant to eliminate "healthy vaccine bias"—the possibility that vaccine recipients were simply healthier or had better health care access to begin with.
- The same Oxford group previously linked Shingrix to lower dementia rates two years ago; Brown University pharmacoepidemiologist Kaleen Hayes, who was not involved in the new study, called the cardiovascular follow-up "really the next question everyone was wondering about."
- Researchers hypothesize the AS01 adjuvant unique to Shingrix—and absent from Zostavax—induces "trained immunity" that alters cytokines and the endothelial cells lining blood vessels, potentially reducing atherosclerosis; co-author Maxime Taquet noted that Zostavax has shown no cardiovascular protection in prior natural experiments, sharpening the suspicion that the adjuvant, not vaccination generally, drives the benefit.
- The findings remain observational; a Danish randomized controlled trial called DAN ZOSTER with roughly 162,000 participants is underway, with first results anticipated in 2027, and the authors flagged as a limitation that TriNetX does not include people with public health insurance.
Why it matters: If confirmed by the **DAN ZOSTER** randomized trial expected in 2027, Shingrix could become the first vaccine with proven heart-protective effects, potentially preventing hundreds of thousands of cardiovascular events in the U.S. alone per co-author **Maxime Taquet**. The individual benefit is modest—1% fewer cardiovascular events over seven years—but Taquet argued the population-level payoff could be "enormous" given that millions of older adults receive shingles vaccines annually, while also nudging more people toward vaccination for its primary shingles protection.
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