An experimental vaccine cut cases of painful, blistering shingles by more than half – good news to the millions of Americans who had childhood chickenpox and are now at risk for shingles.
The vaccine also reduced the severity of cases and cut by 67 percent occurrences of the long-lasting pain that can accompany the disease, according to the study, which appears this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“I’m very excited,” said Dr. Myron Levin, a University of Colorado professor of pediatric infectious diseases and one of the study’s authors.
Merck & Co., the vaccine’s maker, in April submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of the vaccine, named Zostavax. The federal agency has 60 days to decide whether to accept the application for review.
The study, sponsored by Merck and conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health, gave real vaccine or a placebo to 38,500 patients ages 60 and older.
Half of people who live to age 85 will get shingles.
The shingles vaccine uses larger doses of the same kind of weakened virus that is in the chicken-pox vaccine that has been widely given to children since 1995.
Shingles is caused by a reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox. After the chickenpox “goes away,” the virus actually slinks off to live, dormant, in nerve cells, Levin said.
“When it starts to get active again, it starts to infect those nerves” and damages them, he said. “That is what causes the pain.”
When shingles occurs, it usually comes with pain on one side of the body or face and a blistering rash.
While Carl Bozeman, barely remembers having chickenpox as a child, the 53-year-old Longmont resident cannot forget the shingles attack he suffered 2 1/2 years ago, which has caused him pain ever since.
It is no longer as bad as the initial, debilitating pain that sent him to the emergency room, convinced he was having a heart attack.
“It was like being squeezed in a vise,” Bozeman recalled Wednesday. “I couldn’t lift my arm, I could hardly walk. The whole left side of my body was shutting down.”
That intense pain is gone, but Bozeman’s discomfort is bad enough that he has signed on for an unrelated clinical trial of an experimental treatment regimen, including large doses of intravenous antiviral medication.
CU and area residents have been part of the quest for a shingles vaccine since 1988, when an initial version of a vaccine was tested, Levin said. In all, he estimates that 400 or 500 people here have participated in clinical trials of shingles vaccines.
Bozeman wasn’t among those test subjects, and he never got an anti-shingles vaccine. But, he said, “I wish I had.”
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
