What Are The Causes of Shingles?

A lot of us has experienced having chickenpox

, a highly contagious viral infection. Your body gets covered with lots of lesions and watery blisters and you feel feverish, experience headache, and sometimes even nausea. You are also probably aware that once you get infected with chickenpox, your body becomes immune to the virus, meaning you will not experience chickenpox symptoms a second time.

What you may not be aware of is that the body does not get rid of the actual virus. Instead it goes into your nervous system, and then just stays there for a long time. What's worse, if triggered, the chickenpox virus changes itself into a shingles virus, which then results in a shingles outbreak, a much more painful infection.

Shingles is characterized by an outbreak of reddish spots or bumps clumped together, in contrast to the more widespread effect of chickenpox. The spots then become watery and turn to tender blisters after some time. After that, they finally dry up and become scabby. You won't normally experience fever or headache that usually accompanies chickenpox. Instead, you will experience intense pain at the infected are. This is because the nerves become inflamed and damaged by the virus traveling to the surface of the skin.

Nobody really knows what triggers the chickenpox virus to evolve into shingles virus, but some researchers think that several specific factors help trigger the virus to change from its dormant state based on the fact that the presence of these factors are associated with a higher occurrence of shingles.

Many patients that have shingles report having them during times when they are stressed, either due to work or other factors. Shingles have also been reported to erupt on patients experiencing fatigue. Majority of shingles patients are over 50 years old and a small portion of the patients are children. A significant portion of the patients had shingles while they have another disease, such as flu or colds. People constantly taking medications for other diseases are also likely to have shingles. Cancer patients and people undergoing radioactive treatments are also more vulnerable to shingles. Shingles can sometimes occur around injured parts of the skin.

All of these factors have one thing in common: a weak immune system. The immune system of the body is crucial in keeping the virus in its dormant state. A decrease in performance of the immune system allows the virus to reactivate and cause the symptoms to appear.

What Are The Causes of Shingles?

By: Barb Hicks - Clivir Team

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