Just days after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that people aged 60 and older get Merck & Co. Inc’s vaccine Zostavax to protect them against shingles, a new study by scientists from Texas University Medical School in Houston suggests that the disease tends to run in the families. 

Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a skin rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, namely the Varicella zoster virus. After and individual has chickenpox, this virus lives in the nervous system and is never fully cleared from the body. Under certain circumstances, such as emotional stress, immune deficiency, or cancer, the virus reactivates causing shingles.

Anyone who has ever had chickenpox is at risk for shingles, although it occurs most commonly in people over the age of 60.

It has been estimated that up to 1,000,000 cases of shingles occur each year in the U.S. and half of those occur in people 60 and older. More than 43 million adults over the age of 60 in the U.S. are estimated to be at risk for shingles.

For the new study, Dr. Lindsey D. Hicks, B.S. and colleagues compared 504 patients treated for shingles between 1992 and 2005 to 523 control individuals with other minor or chronic skin conditions treated at the same clinic. The participants provided personal and family history of shingles.

The researchers found that those with shingles were about four times as likely as the others to have had a close family member with the disease. Overall, 39.3 percent of the shingles patients had such a relative, compared to 10.5 percent of the other patients.

“Or study suggests a strong association between the development of herpes zoster and having a blood relative with a history of zoster,” the study concluded.

Therefore, these people “have a greater need for vaccination,” as they have an increased risk of developing shingles, which pretty much explains the CDC last week recommendation. Zostavax was found to cut the occurrence of shingles by 50 percent in people age 60 and older. The CDC said that for people ages 60 to 69, it cuts the occurrence of the disease by 64 percent.

The study, called “Family History as a Risk Factor for Herpes Zoster: A Case-Control Study,” was published in the May issue of Archives of Dermatology, a JAMA publication.