50-Plus and Vaccines - An Update on Adult Immunization in an Otherwise Normal Person

The Book - Kindle Version Now Available Worldwide

The Book - Atmasvasth - A Guide to Ageing Healthfully

A 15-point guide to living long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

The Detailed 15-Point Guide to Live Long, Healthy

The 15-Point Guide - Detailed

The detailed 15-points guide to live long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

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This update was spurred by a question that Ajit, a friend asked me based on a recent paper in Jul 24 that found a lower risk of dementia in people who had received the recombinant zoster vaccine. I told him that one swallow does not make a summer, and unless there is a lot more data with randomized controlled trials, this should just be considered a hypothesis generating study. In any case though, the zoster vaccine is now recommended once after the age of 50.

Point 5 of the Atmasvasth guide to live long, healthy is this

5. Manage your medications, supplements, vaccines - daily, once in six months, yearly, one time.

Take your vaccines - zoster, pneumococcal, flu, Tdap, etc. Ensure that all girls in your family under the age of 14 years take the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer in adulthood.

In Jul 2021, I wrote up the adult immunization schedule that those over 50 years of age should consider taking. I had taken help from multiple doctors (Drs. Trupti Gilada, Agam Vora, Raja Dhar and Shashank Joshi) to write that page and I am thankful to them. This update builds on that previous write-up.

Since then the Association of Physicians of India (API) has come up with a comprehensive set of guidelines for adult immunization. The challenge is that the guidelines do not have a specific page for those over 50 without diseases and co-morbidities and specifically for lay people. I spoke to Dr. Tushar Shah, a renowned physician from Juhu, Mumbai who helped me with the new guidelines below. Dr. Agam Vora, one of the co-authors of the API Guidelines corroborated my figure and recommendations.

There are two caveats to remember. 

The first and most important is that these guidelines are for people who are otherwise healthy and do not suffer from illness and disease that may necessitate additional vaccines, based on the specific disease in question.

The second is that these are not supposed to be taken on your own without your doctor’s guidance. 

The aim of this piece is to remind you of the vaccines you are supposed to take. Please have a conversation with your doctor about when and how.  

If you have other serious illnesses or diseases that necessitate other vaccines (e.g. for hepatitis) your doctors will prescribe you those as part of your treatment schedule.

The chikungunya vaccine has been approved for use in the US. The dengue vaccine is approved for administration in many countries in the world. A malaria vaccine for children has been approved in Africa. I am not quite sure why these vaccines are not available in India given that all these diseases are common and cause significant morbidity (illness, days lost from work, etc), but it is possible that in the future, many of them will be made available. If and when that happens, I will keep you updated.