Shingles occurs when the chickenpox virus in your body wakes up. Most of us have either had chickenpox or have been vaccinated against chickenpox, and generally, when you get chickenpox in childhood, your get an itchy, blistery type rash that lasts a week or so and goes away without any problems. Your body creates an immune response that keeps the virus under control and protects you from recurrences for many years. Unfortunately, over time, just like some parts of our bodies wear out, like our joints for example, our immune system weakens too. When our immune system weakens, it can no longer keep the chickenpox virus under control, and under the right circumstances, the virus wakes up, usually in a single nerve root. When the virus wakes up, the area it affects usually starts feeling sensitive to gentle touch and becomes more painful over a few days. Eventually, little blisters show up and your doctor will be able to diagnose you with Shingles.
So what makes the immune system weaken? Stress, both physical and mental, illness with high fevers, major surgery, medications that suppress your immune system like prednisone, and aging. As I mentioned before, as we get older, all parts of our body suffer from aging. Our hair grays, our eyes develop cataracts, our muscles weaken, and our immune system weakens, becoming less able to protect us from infections. The Shingles vaccine awakens that part of the immune system and boosts its ability to protect us from an outbreak of the chickenpox virus in our bodies. It is recommended to receive the vaccine around the age of 50, as our immunity seems to weaken more significantly around that age.
How effective is the vaccine? Studies have shown it to be about 92% effective in preventing you from getting Shingles, and in the event that you get Shingles anyway, it is often less severe than had you not gotten the vaccine. How bad can Shingles be? In some cases, it can be life-altering. Pain in the affected nerve can be severe, affecting sleep and movement. Light wind has been reported to cause extreme sensitivity on the scalp when Shingles has occurred there. When Shingles occurs in the eye, people have gone blind. When it occurs in the mouth, people can’t swallow food or water, and find it difficult to talk. When it occurs in the groin on buttocks, it can be difficult to urinate, have a bowel movement, or sit down. On rare occasions, Shingles can affect motor nerves, causing a loss of ability to use fingers and hands, or lift an arm.
Please consider getting the Shingles vaccine, and be re-vaccinated approximately every 10 years. If you have had Shingles already, you have actually received your booster vaccine, just naturally, and you should be protected for at least 5-10 years. Your doctor can order a blood test to determine whether you have antibodies to the virus, and to watch the level of the antibodies to see whether they are declining, and if it is time to be vaccinated.