There has been a surge of interest in the potentially beneficial effects of late life vaccination in recent years. The challenge in looking at correlations between health and adult vaccination status is that we don't know the degree to which it reflects biological mechanisms, such as trained immunity effects reducing the chronic inflammation of aging, versus selecting for people who generally take better care of their health and thus tend towards better outcomes across the board. Causation is hard to derive from human epidemiological data.
Previous studies suggest that a shingles infection can cause blood clots to form around the brain and heart, raising the risk of events such as heart attacks, strokes, and venous thromboembolism. By preventing the infection, the shingles vaccine is thought to also help prevent the formation of these dangerous clots. For the current study, researchers used TriNetX, a database that includes health records of millions of Americans, to assess rates of serious cardiac events in people age 50 years or older with atherosclerotic disease between 2018-2025. The study included 123,411 people who had received at least one dose of either the Shingrix or Zostavax shingles vaccine and the same number of people who had not received any doses of shingles vaccine. Demographics and other health conditions were similar between the two groups.
When researchers examined cardiac events occurring between one month and one year after shingles vaccination (or the same time period for unvaccinated individuals), they found that vaccination was associated with a lower risk across all outcomes studied. Vaccinated individuals were 46% less likely to suffer any major adverse cardiac event and 66% less likely to die from any cause. They were also 32% less likely to suffer a heart attack, 25% less likely to suffer a stroke and 25% less likely to develop heart failure. These levels of risk reduction are substantial, comparable to what would be expected from quitting smoking.
The study focused only on outcomes during the first year after shingles vaccination, so researchers noted that the lifetime impacts may differ from those observed during this time period. A previous study released in 2025 found getting the shingles vaccine was associated with a 23% lower risk of cardiovascular events in a healthy general population, and the vaccine's cardioprotective effects may last for up to eight years.
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