herpes zoster

These must be good comparison groups.

If I take a thousand people born one week, a thousand people born a week later, why should there be anything different about them except for this tiny difference in age? And in the case of the date of birth cutoff for Shingles vaccination, there's a huge difference in your probability of getting the vaccine.

So if I understand this correctly, in a randomized control trial, that's like what we typically think of as the gold standard for studying two groups.

We artificially create those two groups, right? We randomly put them in two groups.

And if I do this type of exercise versus that type of like, you know, people are kind of tired, I think, or don't really know.

What to make of this? And it's sort of a bit overwhelming.

And what I worry about is that people aren't distinguishing here that the evidence that there is now for Shingles vaccination and dementia from these types of analyses.

It's just a very different level than we have for these other headlines, which are usually not headlines based on clinical trials, but headlines based on epidemiological analysis.

What got you interested in vaccines?

Well, I had a strong interest in infections from the beginning of my career, and it really came about for a clinical need, and that is improving care of older people with herpes zoster and post-hepatic neuralgia.

Believe it or not, when I got in the game, there was no treatment or prevention for it, especially how old I am.

And during my geriatrics fellowship, I also got additional training in virology and vaccinology, which led me to become a lead investigator on the shameless prevention study.

Of course, when you take your time with the patient and you offer a short, a brief discussion with each PCR test and so on, then these questions come.

I had my clinic today and two of my patients today asked me for vaccination for Zoster.

Yeah.

This would not have happened outside of CML.

Of course, when you take your time with the patient and you offer a short, a brief discussion with each PCR test and so on, then these questions come.

I had my clinic today and two of my patients today asked me for vaccination for Zoster.

Yeah.

This would not have happened outside of CML.

in Europe? What's it called again?

Shingles.

Oh, no.

So before you feel really bad for

So if you're measuring the new vaccine against the old vaccine, you might be measuring the effect, you know, of the, the fact that the new vaccine doesn't have any sugaring up of inflammation in the arteries compared to the vaccine, which does have a bit.

Uh, and, you know, if you look at the original studies of the Zoster vaccine, there was a very slight increase in cardiovascular events in the first few days following the vaccine.

Not enough to be a signal of anything, but it's a live vaccine.

So, you know, comparing the new vaccine and the old vaccine is, you know, it's a good control, it's a good com- comparison, but it's not perfect.

[laughs]

A case of, uh, herpes zoster, um, Gürtelrose.

What is it in, in English?

Herpes zoster.

And they're listening and they get me over to FMtalk1065.com. That's FMtalk1065.com. That's what's been happening, folks.

As you know, about three weeks ago, I contacted Shingles, folks.

And let me tell you, today was a rough day for me.

And matter of fact, I...

Right, in older adults.

Pneumococcal vaccine for all adults over sixty-five or those at high risk, and the Zoster live vaccine, which reduces shingles incidence by fifty percent for adults over sixty.

Okay, so a lot of timelines there, but reading further into the source text, I found something that seems completely counterintuitive to me.

Oh, yeah.