Vaccine Can Prevent Shingles and Its Debilitating Pain

Q:  My mother is 86 and was diagnosed with shingles. The lesions are all healed now, but she is still having excruciating pain from them.

Is there anything I can do to prevent getting shingles?

A:  Shingles is caused by reactivation of the chickenpox virus. Any one who has had chickenpox or the chickenpox vaccine is at risk to develop shingles. After having chickenpox, the virus stays dormant in nerve roots. Years later, it can reactivate as shingles.

Shingles causes numbness, itching or severe pain followed by clusters of blister-like lesions in a strip-like pattern on one side of the body.

It is important to try to prevent shingles for the reasons you stated - it can cause debilitating pain so severe that victims of shingles have been known to commit suicide. The pain can persist for weeks, months or even years after the rash heals. It can also be complicated by infection of the blisters or by visual changes including blindness if it involves the eye.

Until recently, we could only hope to reduce the risk of complications by treating patients with shingles early with steroids, pain medications, and antivirals. Now, there is a vaccine that is available that has been shown to reduce the risk of shingles and the pain and other complications associated with them.

The shingles vaccine is given to adults over age 60. It has been shown to reduce the dreaded complications of shingles.

You should not get the vaccine if you are immunocompromised from steroids or certain cancers, if you have just gotten blood products, or if you have had a severe reaction to gelatin products or neomycin in the past. Some insurance companies are not yet covering the vaccine (it costs about $170 plus administration costs), so you may want to check on this before getting the vaccine.

People with shingles are contagious to persons who have not had chickenpox. Therefore, people who have not had chickenpox can catch it if they have close contact with a person who has shingles. However, you cannot catch shingles itself from someone else. You get shingles from your own chickenpox virus, not from someone else.

If you do get shingles, it is important that you see your doctor as soon as you suspect that you might have it. Again, early treatment may reduce the risk for pain and complications.

Deidre L. Faust, MD, is a Staff Physician (Internal Medicine) at the Medical College of Wisconsin's Plank Road Clinic. Her column appears in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

For more information on this topic, see the HealthLink article Vaccine Helps Prevent Chickenpox from Re-emerging as Shingles.

"Dear Doctor" is a compilation of patient questions answered by doctors from the Medical College of Wisconsin.