What you need to know
- Shingles causes a painful rash and can lead to long-term complications, including nerve pain.
- The shingles vaccine is highly effective at preventing the disease and its complications. It’s recommended for adults 50 and older and for younger adults with weakened immune systems.
- New research suggests that the shingles vaccine may provide additional health benefits, including reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke, and dementia.
Shingles is a painful rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, varicella-zoster virus. It affects about 1 million people in the U.S. each year, mostly older adults.
The shingles vaccine significantly lowers your risk of developing the disease and helps protect against long-lasting complications, like nerve pain.
Here’s what to know about shingles, who should get vaccinated, and why prevention matters.
What causes shingles?
After you recover from chickenpox, the varicella-zoster virus stays inactive in your body.
“Normally, your immunity suppresses [the dormant virus],” Dr. Myron Levin, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine and leading shingles researcher who helped develop the first shingles vaccine, tells Public Good News. “But if your immunity is affected—for example, if you have chemotherapy, but also, and most often, with age, our immune response tends to get attenuated.”
When the immune system weakens, the varicella-zoster virus can reactivate, causing shingles.
What are the symptoms?
The most common symptom of shingles is a painful, blistering rash that typically appears on one side of the torso, face, neck, or back.
Other symptoms may include:
- Burning or shooting nerve pain
- Headache
- Fever
- Chills
- Fatigue
- Upset stomach
Most symptoms start improving within seven to 10 days, but the rash may remain visible for several weeks.
The disease can also lead to more serious health problems, including nerve pain that lasts for months or years, vision loss, hearing problems, brain inflammation, facial paralysis, and pneumonia. Shingles is rarely fatal.
Is it contagious?
You cannot get shingles directly from a person who has it. However, someone with open shingles blisters can spread the varicella-zoster virus to people who have never had chickenpox or haven’t received the chickenpox vaccine. Those people can then develop chickenpox, which could turn into shingles later in life.
What should I do if I have shingles symptoms?
Contact a health care provider if you have symptoms of shingles, even if you don’t have a rash. Your provider may prescribe antiviral medication to help you get better faster and recommend ways to manage pain.
Who should get the shingles vaccine, and why?
The American Academy of Family Physicians recommends two doses of the shingles vaccine for adults 50 and older and for people 19 and older with weakened immune systems.
In clinical trials, the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease in adults 50 and older.
“It’s the most effective vaccine for older people that I’ve ever seen,” Levin says. “I got it.”
Research also suggests the shingles vaccine may offer additional benefits. Studies have linked vaccination to a lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and newer research suggests it may also help protect against dementia. In June, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study finding that as many as one in 17 new dementia cases might be prevented through shingles vaccination.
“We have a lot of theories as to why this protection may occur,” says Dr. Kaley Hayes, a pharmacist, epidemiologist, and assistant professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health who led the study. “The leading one is through prevention of strokes and microdamage to brain arteries that doesn’t have symptoms.”
The AAFP also recommends two doses of the chickenpox vaccine for children and adults who have never had chickenpox.
Is the shingles vaccine safe?
“The shingles vaccine is FDA-approved, which means that it had to undergo rigorous testing through trials with thousands of participants that examined both its effectiveness as well as the risk of side effects, both mild and serious, before it could be on the market,” Hayes says. “Beyond those initial trials, several real-world studies have been conducted that reinforce that the risk of serious side effects associated with the vaccine is exceptionally low.”
After receiving the shingles vaccine, you might feel some temporary soreness or swelling where you received the shot, along with fatigue.
“These are normal signs that the body is building immunity in response to vaccination,” Hayes says.
Talk to your health care provider about when you should get vaccinated against shingles.