The Shingles Virus May Be Aging You More Quickly

In 2010, a A Colorado university professor began experiencing worrying signs of cognitive decline.

The speaker, a 63-year-old viral immunologist whose identity has been kept anonymous, experienced alarming symptoms, including memory problems, loss of concentration and difficulty reading. When lecturing 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 identify the source of the problem, and over the next four years his symptoms continued to progress.

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

Remembering that his own symptoms had been preceded by a brief case of shingles, subsequent testing confirmed that the patient had indeed experienced a reactivation of varicella-zoster. So he decided to treat the problem with a course of acyclovir, an antiviral drug commonly prescribed to shingles patients. Much to the surprise of his colleagues, the Colorado professor’s symptoms quickly disappeared and his cognition returned to normal.

This remarkable case study, published in 2016, prompted neurovirologists to delve deeper into the link between shingles and brain aging. For decades, shingles has been primarily associated with a form 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 among older adults. Today, research is beginning to reveal the devastating impact shingles can have on brain health.

According to Andrew Bubak, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Colorado Anschutz, the true burden of varicella-zoster “is totally underestimated. But it is a very treatable virus.”

In recent years, more and more studies have shown that the shingles vaccine appears to be able to protect the aging body and brain, and dementia specialists are taking note. In April 2025, a major study by researchers at Stanford University suggested that shingles vaccination could prevent one in five new cases of dementia. More recent studies have also linked the shingles vaccine to slowing biological aging by various measures.

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

Neurovirologists say the new data highlights the importance of avoiding infection, through childhood chickenpox vaccination – given to children in the US since 1995 and introduced in the UK in January 2026 – as well as the shingles vaccine in adults and booster shots later in life.

Before the United States began routinely vaccinating against chickenpox, more than 90 percent of children contracted the varicella-zoster virus during childhood. After infection, the virus takes up residence in the peripheral nervous system – the neurons connecting the brain and spinal cord to limbs and organs – where it remains dormant, sometimes for decades.

Chickenpox-zoster can reactivate in the body following a variety of triggers, ranging from acute stress and concussion to Covid-19 co-infections, immunosuppressive medications and general aging of the immune system. In many cases, such reactivations may be completely asymptomatic, with some studies suggesting that many of us may unknowingly experience repeated “subclinical” reactivations – the virus waking up from its dormant state without inducing visible symptoms – in mid-to-later life.