Professor Luke O'Neill

speaker

1,535 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Alzheimer’s · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

But the fact is that there's a really strong association now between having the shingles vaccine and decreasing your risk.

They took into account what are called healthy vaccinees.

Some people on the vaccine might be healthier anyway, you see, and that's why they could be having less vaccine.

Alzheimer's because of all these risk factors, they might be observing them already.

But they factor that in and they do think it's a direct effect of the vaccine on the people.

There's a few reasons why they make it credible.

One is shingles is caused by a virus, varicella.

It was chickenpox in childhood.

Hides in your nerve cells.

There's a clue.

Hides in the nerves and re-erupts then in your 50s and 60s.

And maybe that's damaging the brain.

and causing inflammation and provoking the Alzheimer's symptoms.

And so if you vaccinate, it won't erupt as much and you keep the virus under control.

Second reason is there's an adjuvant in the vaccine, a chemical that helps it.

That seems to be able to boost clearance of the plaque maybe by triggering a healthy immune response against it.

And the third is if you have shingles, you have an increased risk of heart attacks and that's a risk for Alzheimer's.

So again, you're getting rid of that.

So there's three possible reasons why the shingles vaccine might

protects now my advice now is get that vaccine if you're over 60 because a 50% decrease risk is remarkable and at a minimum you won't get shingles which is good but secondly you will decrease the risk and very importantly and I hope the Minister for Health is listening make it free for the over 60s please I'm begging you because this in the long run will save a huge amount of money for the health system might cost money up front but these this evidence is so compelling you would be crazy not to allow the over 60s to get access to the shingles vaccine for free so I'm begging

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