A new USA study has found that there is a short-term increased risk of stroke after having shingles, reports Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
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Because events that are cardiovascular often times cause mortality, it is important to know what causes the events and what might be done to prevent that, said one of the researchers from London.
“We found there was a 50% increased risk of stroke for three months after shingles, but we also found that people who had shingles had many more risk factors for stroke than those who had not, suggesting they had worse health overall”, explained lead investigator Barbara P. Yawn, MD, MSc, of the Department of Research, Olmsted Medical Center, Rochester, MN.
Study findings revealed that stroke risk more than doubled in the first week following a shingles’ diagnosis. Risks of heart attack and stroke return to normal levels after six months, researchers note.
The study was done on data that documented the evolution of patients both diagnosed with shingles and having suffered a stroke. The same group found in a previous study that shingles is associated with an increase temporarily of the risk of a stroke in Britain. That older study, however, merely compared individuals who reported having shingles with those who didn’t, and did not take into account certain variables, such as differences in cardiovascular risk, skewing the results.
Over 137,000 Medicare beneficiaries were looked at in this research, with all 65 years of age or older and with shingles. Roughly 24,000 shingles patients who experienced a heart attack in the same timeframe were also included. The increase in heart attack risk followed a similar pattern, almost doubling in risk during the first week after a shingles diagnosis.
Study’s author Caroline Minassian from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in England said that the findings indicate that when patients have shingles then they may be most vulnerable.
It appears that anyone who ever had chickenpox is exposed to shingles due to the fact that the same virus causes both diseases. Risk again returned to baseline by the 27th week. The increased rate of acute cardiovascular events reduced gradually over the 6 months following herpes zoster.
A disease linked to chickenpox has been found to increase the risk of stroke by 50 percent for three months in adults aged 50 and over.
The study “did not look at the mechanisms involved in the associations”, Minassian says.
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Minassian also cautioned that other factors – such as major life events or stress at the time of shingles – might also play a role in people’s cardiovascular risk. Very few (between 2 percent and 3 percent) had received the shingles vaccine before diagnosis, the study authors said. Usually the immune system can control it after the first outbreak of chicken pox, but as people get older, or if they get cancer or another condition that depresses the immune system, it can erupt in a band of blisters.
