You may have heard of shingles many times before but didn't know what kind of disease it actually is. Shingles, less commonly known as herpes zoster, or zona, is a viral illness distinguished by a painful, unpleasant skin rash accompanied with blisters in a certain region on one side of the body. Shingles generally appear in characteristic long straight regions or stripes. The starting infection of Varicella zoster virus (VZV) the acute disease, which has a short and fast onset but severe course, is chickenpox, which primarily occurs in children, adolescents and, less commonly, in young adults.
Once the development of chickenpox has concluded, the virus is not eradicated out of the body and can go into a dormant or inactive stage, eventually causing the development of shingles - a viral illness with signs and symptoms that differ from what can be observed from the initial Varicella zoster infection. Shingles usually shows up many years after the first infection.
Varicella zoster virus, as earlier mentioned, can become latent or inactive in the nerve cell bodies after the initial chickenpox infection; and less periodically in the dorsal nerve root, cranial nerves and the autonomic ganglion, without showing any signs or symptoms. Many years after getting infected by chickenpox, the virus may come out from the nerve cell bodies and travel down to the nerve axons that will result in the viral infection, shingles, of the skin in the area of the infected nerve.
The rash of the infection then becomes painful because a dermatome becomes affected, which is a region of skin catered to by a single spinal nerve. Although the rash usually subsides within a matter of two to four weeks, some people may suffer from residual nerve pain for a couple of months or even years, a circumstance known as post-herpetic neuralgia. As for the explanation of how the virus ends up in the nerves and becomes latent, no clear and definite answer can be provided as of now.
Around the world, the incidence rate (a measure of the risk of developing a new disease within a certain time period) for healthy individuals every single year for herpes zoster goes between 1.2 to 3.4 cases for every 1,000 individuals. The incidence rate goes higher for individuals older than 65 years old to 3.9 to 11.8 cases for every 1,000 individuals, every year. Until now, there are no drugs that can cure viral infections such as that of shingles but antiviral drugs can decrease the severity and duration of shingles provided that the prescribed period of treatment of these drugs is followed and started, at the most, 72 hours from the appearance of discernable rashes.
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