>>>>>>>>>>>> The study took advantage of something that happened in Britain in 2013, when the country’s National Health Service rolled out shingles vaccines for everyone born on or after Sept. 1, 1933, but completely excluded those born before that date. Pascal Geldsetzer, a professor of medicine at Stanford and one of the study’s authors, says this created a real-world experiment similar to the kind you get in a lab, where people of similar age—in some cases just a few days or weeks apart—were randomly assigned into two groups.
“We are able to get credibly a causal effect because we are able to exploit this really unique way that the shingles vaccine was rolled out in Britain in the National Health Service,” he tells MarketWatch. “It allows us to compare people who differ by just a week or two in their age. I think it’s a really neat, clean way to mimic what we would do in a clinical trial.”
Incidentally, these U.K. numbers might significantly understate any impact of shingles vaccines on future dementia, although we cannot know for sure. In most cases, those who got a vaccine only got one, rather than successive boosters. The follow-ups were only within seven years. And the study looked only at those who were given the vaccine in their 70s or older. >>>>>>>>>>>
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