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About 30% of people develop herpes zoster (HZ) during their lifetimes. Immunosuppression and advancing age increase risk, perhaps because the immune system helps keep dormant varicella-zoster virus in check and immunity wanes with increasing age. Other risk factors may also have an influence.
To evaluate this possibility, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a case-control, hypothesis-generating study using databases including more than 500 million medical claims and 28 million enrollees. The study population was narrowed to enrollees aged 20 to 64 years. Subjects with ICD-9 codes for HZ during the study period (59,173 cases) were compared with 616,177 controls with no such code. Ten chronic medical con…