Getting vaccinated against shingles could significantly reduce your risk of cardiovascular problems. A study of more than 72,000 people suggests that those who have received the latest shingles vaccine are less likely to develop conditions like stroke or heart failure than individuals who got an older version of the jab. This may be because the latest vaccine contains a chemical that boosts the immune response and may reprogram immune cells to cause less inflammation.

The same vaccine has previously been linked to a significantly lower risk of dementia. “People should get their shingles vaccine not only because it stops them getting shingles, which in [and] of itself can be very unpleasant and quite dangerous, but also it potentially gives you protection against dementia and heart disease,” says at Imperial College London, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Shingles is an infection caused by reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox. The condition, which causes a painful rash that can get infected, .

In 2025, a study linked being vaccinated against shingles to having a reduced risk of cardiovascular conditions, but this was based on comparing people who choose to get vaccinated with those who don’t. Vaccinated people tend to have healthier lifestyles in general, making it unclear whether shingles vaccination itself really boosts cardiovascular health, said at the University of Oxford during a press briefing.

To address this, Taquet and his colleagues made use of the fact that, in October 2017, the standard shingles vaccine administered in the US switched from Zostavax to Shingrix. The former contains a live, weakened version of the varicella-zoster virus, while Shingrix is made up of a protein from the virus, along with a chemical that strongly stimulates immunity, called AS01.

The team analysed the medical records of more than 72,000 people aged 60 and older, about half of whom received Zostavax between April and September 2017. Nearly all the remaining participants received Shingrix the following year.

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By 3.5 years after vaccination, 10.9 per cent of participants who had Zostavax had developed at least one of three conditions: heart failure, stroke or clogged arteries in the heart. This is compared with 9.6 per cent in the Shingrix group – a small but statistically significant difference.

“Even though the percentage changes are small, the absolute numbers of heart disease cases are high, so it can lead to a large actual number of people being protected,” says Tregoning.

This benefit waned over the next 3.5 years but was still higher in the Shingrix group.

This is the best evidence yet that being vaccinated against shingles reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, says Taquet. “Our study leverages a natural experiment that mitigates many of [the] biases [associated with observational research] and provides a more reliable estimate of the effect of Shingrix on cardiovascular disease,” he says.

The availability of Shingrix in the US in October 2017 coincided with eligibility for a shingles vaccine being lowered from age 60 to 50. The researchers estimate that if everyone aged 50 and older in the US received Shingrix, it could delay or prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of cardiovascular problems within a decade, said Taquet. Currently, only about a get it. anyone who turned 65 on or after 1 September 2023.

How Shingrix curbs cardiovascular issues is unclear, but prior research suggests that AS01 reprogrammes immune cells known as monocytes to , called cytokines, said team member , also at the University of Oxford, during the press briefing. These promote the clogging of blood vessels, she said.

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, which may further lower the risk of cardiovascular problems, says Tregoning. “If you have a viral infection, you’ll then get inflammation in your body, and that will then put stress on your other organs, including the heart,” he says.

In an , more than 160,000 people aged 65 and older in Denmark will receive either Shingrix or no shingles vaccine. This should provide even stronger evidence for a causal link between Shingrix and a lower risk of both cardiovascular outcomes and dementia, said Taquet.

Initial results are expected in 2027. If positive, offering Shingrix as a booster vaccine every few years could significantly improve cardiovascular health and lower healthcare costs, he said.

The hepatitis B vaccine seems to reduce the risk of developing diabetes, and not just by preventing the infection.

The vaccine is routinely offered to infants in most countries, usually via three doses. In the US, this became part of the vaccination programme in 1991, so only .

Scientists have previously found . This may be due to the hepatitis B virus – which infects the liver and spreads through blood, semen and vaginal fluids – from the blood. This could raise the risk of diabetes, where blood sugar levels are persistently too high.

But prior studies have not looked at whether the vaccine might reduce diabetes risk among a group of both immunised and non-immunised people who haven’t contracted hepatitis B, which would suggest the effect acts independently of just preventing the infection.

To explore this, at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan and her colleagues analysed the health records of more than 580,000 people living across the US, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific. On average, these records spanned nearly four years for each individual between 2005 and 2023.

None of the participants, who were aged between 18 and 90, had any kind of diabetes or had been infected with the hepatitis B virus, according to their records and the absence of infection-specific blood markers. About half of them had received a hepatitis B vaccine, gauged according to levels of virus-specific antibodies in their blood.

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The team found the vaccinated participants had an overall 15 per cent lower rate of diabetes – defined as them either receiving a diagnosis, having a persistently high blood sugar level or being prescribed diabetes drugs – than their unvaccinated counterparts. The vast majority of cases were type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the condition. The results will be presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes Annual Meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Although this is observational research, the scientists also found a dose-response effect, where the vaccinated participants with higher levels of hepatitis B-specific antibodies were less likely to develop diabetes than those with lower levels. Differences in antibody levels may be a reflection of how many vaccine doses the individual participants received, how recently they were immunised or general variation in immune responses.

As to the mechanism, the fact none of the participants had knowingly been infected with hepatitis suggests being immunised reduces diabetes risk independent of just preventing infection, says Phan. One potential explanation is it somehow reduces chronic inflammation that damages the liver and pancreas, which release hormones that regulate blood sugar levels, like insulin, she says.

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However, the scientists can’t rule out the possibility that part of the vaccine’s protective effect comes from preventing the infection, she says. They hope to explore the potential pathways involved, and how they may vary between different forms of diabetes, in studies in mice, says Phan.

It is possible people who get vaccinated are simply more likely to make lifestyle choices that reduce type 2 diabetes risk, such as eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. “People who are prone to get vaccinated are generally people who are more conscious about living a healthy life,” says at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Germany.

The team accounted for factors that could affect the results, such as the participants’ age, sex and whether they smoked or had other conditions, like obesity and high blood pressure. But Osterhaus maintains the influence of such factors cannot be ruled out.

Custom-made cancer vaccines that prime an individual’s immune system to attack the unique biology of their tumour have halted the progression of melanoma skin cancer in almost half the people taking part in a randomised clinical trial.

We may typically think of vaccines as being used to prevent infections, but there is growing interest in using them to treat medical conditions, particularly cancer. The idea of a vaccine is to help the immune system battle a foreign agent, be it a virus or cancer cell.

The trial was carried out by the pharmaceutical company Moderna, which made the personalised cancer vaccines using similar mRNA technology to its covid-19 vaccines. The trial was made up of 157 people in the US and Australia who had recently undergone surgery to remove melanomas but were at a high risk of developing new tumours because some cancer cells had spread to other parts of their body.

All of the participants received an existing melanoma immunotherapy treatment called pembrolizumab, sold under the brand name Keytruda. Two-thirds were also injected with a personalised cancer vaccine.

The vaccines were made by first identifying the unique set of proteins on each participant’s melanoma. Researchers then created mRNA that would instruct the participant’s cells to make snippets of up to 34 of these proteins once the mRNA is injected. The vaccine therefore trained the individual’s immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells expressing these proteins.

The participants who received a personalised vaccine plus pembrolizumab were 44 per cent less likely to develop new tumours or die over the follow-up period of up to three years, compared with those who were treated with pembrolizumab alone, .

“The exciting thing is that you’re using people’s own tumours as the triggers for the vaccination so hopefully there will be better [cancer] outcomes in the long term because it’s tumour-specific,” says at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, a cancer hospital in Sydney, Australia.

The vaccine, which was injected nine times across a year, was also safe, says at the University of Sydney, who was involved in the Australian arm of the trial. Side effects included redness at the injection site or flu-like symptoms for a few days, she says.

Vaccines for treating cancer have been in development for decades but have mostly failed due to the variability between people’s tumours.

To overcome this challenge, several research groups have been developing personalised cancer vaccines since around 2014, with generally promising results. Moderna’s trial is the largest reported so far and the only one with a randomised controlled design.

The company is planning a trial of 1000 people with melanoma that should begin in 2023.

Most trials of personalised cancer vaccines have been in people with melanoma, since this type of cancer expresses a wide range of proteins on its surface that can be targeted with vaccines. Moderna has said it plans to rapidly expand its personalised vaccines to target additional tumour types following these promising melanoma results.

The most commonly used covid-19 vaccines are safe in pregnancy, a study has confirmed.

There has been a lack of clarity over the risks of covid-19 and vaccines against it during pregnancy throughout much of the pandemic. In the UK, covid-19 vaccines began being rolled out in December 2020, but were not offered to pregnant people until April 2021.

Worldwide, pregnant people are now broadly encouraged to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. But in the UK, .

To better understand the vaccines’ safety profile, at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Canada and his colleagues surveyed 191,360 people, aged 15 to 49, between December 2020 and November 2021. Over these 11 months, the alpha, beta, gamma and delta coronavirus variants were .

The participants, who were from seven Canadian provinces, self-reported any health issues they may have experienced in the seven days after they received the first or second dose of a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna coronavirus vaccine. The team didn’t include people who received modified adenovirus vaccines, such as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, as only a relatively small number of pregnant people in Canada were immunised with this vaccine type.

The participants, of whom more than 97 per cent identified as women, were split into three groups: pregnant people who were vaccinated against covid-19, unvaccinated pregnant people and people who were vaccinated but not pregnant.

“This study was looking at whether there were any complications associated with [the coronavirus] vaccine doses during pregnancy,” says at the University of Toronto in Canada, a co-author of the study. The study didn’t ask whether the vaccine protects pregnant people from severe covid-19, which is supported by other research, she says.

The researchers found that in the seven days after a first vaccine dose, 1.5 per cent of the 5597 vaccinated pregnant people reported a stillbirth or miscarriage, which resulted in hospitalisation in some cases. This is compared with 2.1 per cent of the 339 unvaccinated pregnant people who experienced a stillbirth or miscarriage in the seven days before they were surveyed.

For comparison, the researchers assessed the hospitalisation rate of the non-pregnant but vaccinated participants. Of these, just 0.6 per cent were admitted for any reason in the seven days after their first vaccine dose.

“The one thing that all women who are pregnant worry about is the baby,” says McGeer. “In this sizable study, we were unable to detect any adverse events associated with pregnancy for those who got the vaccine.”

Other serious pregnancy complications – such as vaginal bleeding, abnormal foetal heart rate and reduced foetal movement – were rarely reported by any of the participants. Although the rate of these events was low, it was comparable between the pregnant participants, regardless of whether they had been vaccinated against covid-19.

“It is very reassuring that there is no evidence of any safety concerns associated with vaccination in pregnancy, especially as high levels of vaccination hesitancy in pregnancy persist,” says at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

The team also found that just 4 per cent of pregnant people reported less serious health issues, such as muscle pain and headaches, in the seven days following their first vaccine dose, rising to 7.5 per cent in the week after a second dose.

Meanwhile, 6.3 per cent of the vaccinated non-pregnant people reported mild side effects in the week after dose one, increasing to 11.3 per cent in the seven days after dose two.

It is unclear why pregnant people experienced fewer mild symptoms after vaccination than non-pregnant people, says McGeer. It might be due to the way the immune system changes when someone is pregnant, she says.

The , the UK’s and the  in the US all recommend that pregnant people get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Past research has shown the potential risks of catching covid-19 in pregnancy. According to a study published in July, having covid-19 in late pregnancy is linked to a seven-fold higher risk of premature birth.

A more recent study review found that pregnant people with covid-19 are more likely to experience heart complications than those who aren’t pregnant.