The shingles virus may cause you to age more quickly

In 2010, A A college lecturer from Colorado began experiencing troubling signs of cognitive decline.

The lecturer – a 63-year-old viral immunologist whose identity has not been revealed – suffered worrying symptoms, including poor memory, poor concentration and difficulty reading. While lecturing to students, he found that he had difficulty concentrating and was often unable to finish sentences without pausing. But medical tests, including a brain biopsy, failed to find the source of the problem, and over the next four years, his symptoms continued to progress.

His deterioration likely would have continued unabated had he not heard about a case of encephalitis, a serious infection of the brain caused by reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus, commonly associated with childhood chickenpox and, later in life, shingles.

Recall that his symptoms were preceded by a brief case of shingles, and subsequent tests confirmed that the patient had indeed experienced a reactivation of varicella zoster. So he decided to treat the problem with acyclovir, an antiviral drug commonly prescribed to shingles patients. To the surprise of his colleagues, the Colorado lecturer’s symptoms quickly resolved and his cognition returned to normal.

This fascinating case study, published in 2016, inspired neurovirologists to look deeper into the relationship between shingles and brain aging. For decades, shingles has been associated mostly with a type of nerve pain known as postherpetic neuralgia, which can be so severe that it was once cited as the leading cause of pain-related suicide in older adults. Now, research is beginning to reveal the devastating impact shingles can have on brain health.

According to Andrew Boback, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Colorado Anschutz, the true burden of varicella zoster “has been completely underestimated. But it is a very treatable virus.”

In recent years, a growing number of studies have shown that the shingles vaccine appears to be able to protect the aging body and brain, and dementia specialists are taking notice. In April 2025, a large study conducted by researchers at Stanford University suggested that vaccination against shingles could prevent one in five new cases of dementia. More recent studies have also linked getting the shingles vaccine to slowing biological aging through a variety of measures.

One explanation offered for the results is that the vaccine may stimulate the immune system in a broadly beneficial way. While there is likely some truth to this, additional research increasingly points to the value of avoiding shingles (or varicella-zoster virus reactivation) in the first place, with two separate studies finding associations between shingles and self-reported cognitive decline and dementia.

Neurovirologists believe these emerging data underscore the importance of avoiding infection, both through childhood chickenpox vaccination — which has been given to children in the United States since 1995 and was introduced in the United Kingdom in January 2026 — and through the shingles vaccine for adults and booster doses later in life.

Before the United States began routine vaccination against chickenpox, more than 90% of children were infected with the varicella-zoster virus in childhood. After infection, the virus takes up residence in the peripheral nervous system — the nerve cells that connect the brain and spinal cord to the limbs and organs — where it remains dormant, sometimes for decades.

Varicella zoster can reactivate in the body after various triggers, ranging from acute stress to concussion, Covid-19 co-infection, immunosuppressive medications, and general aging of the immune system. In many cases, these reactivations may be completely asymptomatic, with some studies suggesting that many of us may inadvertently experience repeated “subclinical” reactivations — that is, the virus waking up from its dormant state without causing visible symptoms — in mid or late life.