Is Chronic Stress Behind the Rise of Shingles in Younger Adults?

The Trend: Consider this a kind of medical Freaky Friday — but one sided, and not featuring Lindsay Lohan (at least to our knowledge): more young people are getting shingles. The virus has a reputation for being an older person’s illness — and while most shingles cases are in adults over 50, cases in people in their 30s and 40s have been on the rise in recent years. 

What People Are Saying: After we get chickenpox, the varicella virus stays dormant in our nerves for decades (though not everyone who’s had chickenpox will get shingles). A shingles outbreak happens when that virus gets “reawakened” and travels along a nerve pathway until it emerges as a painful rash in a (usually) small area of skin. There are many reasons why this happens, but the common denominator is a weakened immune system. Among younger adults, the top factor causing this is stress — and prolonged daily stress is increasingly prevalent.

What to Know: Chronic stress makes us susceptible to shingles by keeping the body in a suspended “fight or flight” state, taxing the immune system. When we’re stressed all the time, levels of the stress hormone cortisol stay high and cause inflammation. High cortisol messes with sleep, too, which also weakens immune defenses.