Shingles Falls Sharply in the First Generation Vaccinated Against Chickenpox

Shingles, the painful rash caused by the reawakening of the chickenpox virus, is becoming much less common among young adults who were the first to be vaccinated against chickenpox as children, according to an analysis of electronic health records released on Friday by Epic Research.

The researchers examined records for more than 85 million adults in the United States, tracking shingles diagnoses from 2019 to mid-2026. Among people aged 25 to 29, rates fell by more than half over that period, to about 3 cases per 10,000 by 2026, NBC News reported. Rates also dropped among people 30 to 34.

Looked at by year of birth, the pattern is stark. Adults born from 1968 to 1975 had about 182 shingles diagnoses per 10,000, roughly 26 times the rate for those born from 2006 to 2008. The largest drop between neighboring groups came between people born in the early 1990s and those born in the late 1990s, when the rate fell about 62 percent, from 45.5 to 17.3 per 10,000. That timing matches the arrival of routine childhood chickenpox vaccination.

The first chickenpox vaccine was approved in 1995 and added to the childhood schedule that year, and states began requiring it for school and daycare in 1997, NBC noted. Chickenpox infections have since fallen by about 97 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kersten Bartelt, a registered nurse who led one of two Epic Research teams that analyzed the data independently and reached similar conclusions, told NBC that the decline reflects the first generation eligible to be vaccinated. Dr. Sharon Curhan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved, said vaccinated people can still get shingles but face much lower risk.

The trend runs the other way for older adults. Rates rose among people in their 40s, reaching about 16 per 10,000 among women aged 45 to 49. Curhan suggested that, before vaccination, repeated exposure to children with chickenpox may have acted as a natural booster for adults’ immunity, though no single cause has been identified.

The findings come with important caveats. The analysis did not check whether individual patients actually received the vaccine, so it shows a strong association rather than proof. The pandemic disrupted routine doctor visits in 2020 and 2021, which may distort trends. And because shingles is rare before age 50, it is too early to know whether the protection will hold as vaccinated generations reach the ages when the disease is most common. Epic Research published the analysis on its own website, and NBC News described it as a report rather than a journal article.

Still, the results offer encouraging evidence for a childhood shot whose benefits may extend well beyond preventing chickenpox itself. Shingles can cause long-lasting nerve pain and, when it affects the eye, vision loss.