Comment by teraflop
2 years ago
You have to be careful how you read that. The researchers did not find that the shingles vaccine does not protect men (from dementia caused by Alzheimer's). They failed to find statistically significant evidence, in their studied population, that the vaccine protects men.
As the preceding sentence says, this can be plausibly explained by the fact that shingles is more common in women, so whatever protective effect the vaccine has is larger and more measurable.
The paper found absolutely no effect in men. That is to say: No trend nor indication that it might protect men.
Sometimes trends seem suggestive of a real effect, but don't rise to statistical significance. That is not the case here.
This is in Figure 4 of the preprint.
It could also be that there is a potential effect that this study would have been underpowered to detect, and by chance no trend was visible in this population. That's not inconsistent, or even particularly unlikely, if I'm understanding it right.
(A) To suggest that the lack of effect in men is a statistical anomaly, and that there IS an effect we're not seeing.
(B) To suggest that the effect in women is a statistical anomaly, and that there's nothing there but a fluke.
These things, from the data, are approximately equally likely. Because there was zero effect in men -- in fact, men who took the vaccine were apparently more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, though this trend was extremely slight.
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