The Unexpected Ways Vaccines Could Boost Your Health
Despite being among the great scientific breakthroughs of all time, vaccines are under fire as top government officials cast doubts on their safety. But as doctors and vaccine deniers spar over the safety of vaccines, emerging evidence finds that some vaccines aren’t only good at preventing the disease or virus they target but also might have broader or even unrelated health benefits.
While the focus has been on childhood vaccines, researchers are studying whether certain adult vaccines can be used for dementia prevention or for improving cancer survival rates. The shingles vaccine, for example, might help reduce the risk of developing dementia later. The Covid-19 vaccine, when given to certain cancer patients, increased their survival rates, one recent study found.
An old tuberculosis vaccine—bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or BCG—is being studied to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. It has also been shown to decrease infant mortality in parts of the developing world where it is still widely used. It is a concept known as trained immunity. Adaptive immunity trains the immune system to recognize a specific pathogen. Trained immunity is a form of innate immune memory whereby the body generates a more robust response to even unrelated exposures.
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Because the chickenpox varicella-zoster virus remains dormant in the nervous system, it is plausible that it is a chronic stressor causing chronic inflammation, says Geldsetzer. “We know inflammation is a bad thing for many chronic diseases, including dementia,” he says. “Reducing these activations through shingles vaccination may well have benefits.”
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In other research, an October study in the journal Nature found that some cancer patients who received the Covid-19 vaccine while undergoing immunotherapy had a more than 50% greater survival rate than those who didn’t. The patients had stage three or four lung cancer or melanoma. Other vaccines, for flu or pneumonia, didn’t have the same benefit, said Dr. Steven Hsesheng Lin, a professor of radiation oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and senior author on the study. Lin attributes the benefit to mRNA vaccines specifically. An mRNA vaccine uses messenger RNA to get your cells to make a piece of a virus that is harmless. This sets off an immune response to teach your body how to combat the disease without being exposed to its harms.
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