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In a recent study published in Nature, FLEX researcher Markus Eyting and his co-authors Min Xie, Felix Michalik, Simon Heß, Seunghun Chung, and Pascal Geldsetzer exploit a natural experiment to investigate the causal effect of shingles vaccination on dementia risk. The opportunity for causal inference arose from the UK’s rollout of the herpes zoster vaccine, which was based strictly on date of birth: individuals born on or after 2 September 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine during the first year of the program, while those born just one day earlier were permanently ineligible. This created a quasi-random assignment of individuals into treatment and control groups, enabling the researchers to apply a regression discontinuity design. ...