Francine Jones, a 39-year-old healthcare assistant from Hereford, developed shingles in May and ended up with severe pain, blisters and weeks of itching. In a case that fits the rise in Shingles In Millennial Women, she said the pain felt like an electric shock and the itching sometimes left her with only four hours of sleep.
Jones said 10 large blisters and smaller ones formed in a band from her stomach to her back. She was diagnosed by a pharmacist, given antiviral medication for seven days and later prescribed Gabapentin for nerve pain.
Francine Jones and Hereford
Jones said the pain began under her bra with a strange pricking sensation. It then spread into a band across her torso, and she described the stabbing pain as: "That is the only way I can describe it," and "It was a really sharp, intense pain, as if someone was giving me an electric shock … it took my breath away."
She also said, "It was like something was crawling all over me all the time." The itching lasted for five weeks, and she said it sometimes limited her sleep to four hours a night. She was still taking Gabapentin at the time of the article and had been off work for two months, with sporadic aching in her side.
Clinical Infectious Diseases
The rise in younger adults is what makes Jones's case stand out. A 2019 US research paper reported the sharpest rise in shingles cases was among people aged 30 to 49, and cases in that group more than doubled between 1998 and 2017.
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a reactivation of the varicella zoster virus that lies dormant after chickenpox. The first symptom is usually pain or tingling in one area of skin, and a US study published this year in Clinical Infectious Diseases found higher risk in people aged 30 to 39 with asthma, diabetes, depression and stress.
US for Adults in
The broader rise across age groups has no clear explanation, though experts speculate that stress and depression may play a role. The uptake of the shingles vaccine in the over-50s in the US is still too low to explain the trend, leaving the question of what is driving the increase among adults in their 30s and 40s unresolved.
