A new analysis of more than 85 million adult patient records from the United States has found that shingles became far less common among the first birth cohorts eligible for routine childhood chickenpox vaccination.
The analysis, published on 2 October 2026 by Epic Research, a group that studies patient records from thousands of hospitals and clinics across the US, found the biggest drop between people born in the early 1990s and those born a few years later.
Shingles is a painful rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox.
After a person recovers from chickenpox, the virus stays dormant in nerve tissue and can reactivate years later as shingles.
Epic's report, citing the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says about one in three people in the US develop shingles in their lifetime, and that the risk rises with age.
The chickenpox vaccine was introduced in the US in 1995, so people born from the mid-1990s onward are the first to reach adulthood largely in the vaccine era, the report said.
It also noted that children vaccinated against chickenpox carry a lower risk of later shingles than children who catch the natural virus.
Epic's researchers counted adults diagnosed with shingles between January 2019 and June 2026 and grouped them by year of birth.
The rate climbed steeply with age.
Among people born between 2006 and 2008, it was 6.9 per 10,000.
Among those born between 1968 and 1975, it was 181.9 per 10,000, roughly 26 times higher.
The sharpest step down between neighbouring groups came between people born in 1991–1995 and those born in 1996–2000.
The rate fell from 45.5 per 10,000 to 17.3 per 10,000, a drop of 62%.
The report said this break coincides with the first birth groups eligible for routine childhood chickenpox vaccination.
The researchers also followed new shingles cases among adults aged 18 to 49 over time.
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Rates among the youngest adults fell steadily, and among those aged 25 to 29 they more than halved to roughly 3 per 10,000 by 2026.
Epic said part of that fall likely reflects the age groups filling up with people born after the vaccine arrived.
In the oldest groups the picture was different.
Rates dipped through 2022 and 2023, then climbed to the top of their range by 2026, reaching about 16 per 10,000 among women aged 45 to 49.
Epic's key findings said rates rose among adults aged 40 to 49 between 2019 and 2026.
Epic's researchers did not check whether any individual patient had been vaccinated.
The study shows two things happening in the same period, a falling shingles rate and the arrival of the vaccine, and cannot show that one caused the other.
It is also an analysis of health records, not a trial. It was published on Epic's own research site rather than in a medical journal.
The report listed a further limit.
The rates were measured among patients seen in outpatient care, so the drop in routine visits during 2020 and 2021, and their return afterwards, may account for part of the dip and rebound in the older groups without representing a real change in shingles.
The youngest adults in the vaccine-era birth cohorts represented in this analysis were still relatively young in 2026, so the data do not yet show what their shingles rates will look like later in life.
In 2019, researchers participating in the CDC-sponsored Vaccine Safety Datalink reported in the journal Pediatrics that vaccinated children had lower shingles rates than unvaccinated children.
They studied records of about 6.3 million children from 2003 to 2014.
According to the study's abstract, shingles occurred at a rate of 38 per 100,000 person-years among vaccinated children, compared with 170 per 100,000 among unvaccinated children.
That study compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children directly. Epic's analysis did not.
Source: Epic Research (Kersten Bartelt, Nicholas Volker, Sam Butler, Joe Deckert), Cosmos dataset, 2 October 2026.
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