Dr. Helen Chu

to help us understand whether or not these results hold.

There are studies that are starting in Denmark.

These are larger clinical trials that will evaluate the effect of shingles vaccine on prevention of dementia.

And I think those will help answer the question.

It is biologically plausible.

The idea that... Say more about that, Helen.

So we know that these viruses are inflammatory.

What they do is they have a predilection for blood vessels and they cause inflammation.

And we know a lot of dementia is what's called vascular dementia.

So dementia that results from potentially inflammation of the blood vessels that go to your brain.

And so the idea that you could have a vaccine that prevents inflammation in your vessels that then goes on to prevent heart attacks, strokes, dementia, other long-term outcomes, that is certainly something that could be true.

But I think these are early studies and there have been a lot of them, but I think it would be nice to see this in a clinical trial setting to prove that this is the case.

But I agree, this is very exciting.

I think there are many ways to think about that.

The live attenuated vaccines have this ability to protect beyond the pathogen.

So we see that with measles vaccine.

We see that with BCG, which is a vaccine that babies get at birth to prevent against severe tuberculosis disease in certain countries.

We know that these types of live vaccines seem to have a broadly protective effect.

So the way that we think of these live vaccines as working, the tuberculosis vaccine and the MMR vaccine, the measles vaccine, is that they seem to be broadly protective by triggering something called an innate immune response, which is where your body mounts a more nonspecific vaccine.

protective response that protects you from diseases beyond just measles or tuberculosis.