If you have been offered the shingles shot, you probably said yes to avoid a nasty rash.
Few of us think of a vaccine as something that could also look after the heart.
Now a large Oxford study links the shingles vaccine Shingrix to a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and heart failure in older adults.
The findings, published in Nature Medicine on August 27, 2026, come from more than 70,000 people aged 60 and over who were tracked for seven years.
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People who got Shingrix had a 9% lower overall burden of cardiovascular disease than those who had received the older live vaccine, Zostavax.
Within that, the Oxford team found a 10% lower risk of ischemic heart disease, which is the narrowing of the arteries that feed the heart muscle.
Heart failure risk was 12% lower in the Shingrix group.
Among men, the vaccine was tied to a similar drop in stroke risk, though the signal was not statistically meaningful in women.
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What is Shingrix and who can get it?
Shingrix is a recombinant vaccine, meaning it is built from a small protein from the shingles virus rather than a weakened live virus.
The US Food and Drug Administration approved it in October 2017.
It replaced the older Zostavax, which was pulled from the US market in 2020.
Shingrix is given as two doses, two to six months apart.
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According to the CDC, Shingrix is recommended for all adults aged 50 and older.
Adults 19 and older with weakened immune systems from disease or treatment are also eligible.
The heart effect
The team used the US switch from Zostavax to Shingrix as a kind of natural experiment.
People vaccinated in 2017, mostly with Zostavax, were compared with similar people vaccinated in 2018, mostly with Shingrix.
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Health outcomes came from the US TriNetX electronic records network, with more than 36,000 adults in each matched group.
The lead researcher, Oxford associate professor of psychiatry Maxime Taquet, said the effect could matter at scale.
If clinical trials confirm the finding, vaccinating older adults against shingles could prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure worldwide. He said this in a statement.
What the numbers mean in practice
The design is observational, so it cannot prove the vaccine itself is what protects the heart.
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Something else about people who got Shingrix, rather than the shot itself, could partly explain the gap.
In absolute terms, the difference worked out to roughly 1 fewer cardiovascular event for every 100 people over seven years.
That looks small on its own, but millions of adults receive the shot each year, so the total number of events avoided could be large.
The same Oxford group had already linked Shingrix to a lower dementia risk in earlier work, raising the question of how a vaccine against a rash might also act on the brain and the heart.
Researchers caution that the strongest answer will come from a randomized trial.
One such study, DAN ZOSTER in Denmark, is enrolling about 162,000 adults, with first results expected in 2027.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.