The itchy-scratchy misery of a chickenpox was until recently a rite of passage for children around the world. The varicella-zoster virus causes chickenpox infections. This virus persists in small numbers in nerve cells for many years after infection, and can reactivate from these cells. Often this reactivation causes no symptoms, but sometimes it results in a painful skin condition called shingles (or herpes zoster), especially in older adults.

Some countries—including the United States, Australia, Taiwan and Greece—have virtually wiped out childhood cases of chickenpox by requiring that children be vaccinated against the varicella-zoster virus. But some countries have hesitated. One reason for this hesitation is that exposure to individuals with a chickenpox infection helps boost the immunity of individuals who have previously been infected. This may help reduce the likelihood of these people developing shingles later in life. So, some countries have worried that chickenpox vaccinations might inadvertently increase the number of shingles cases. To assess this risk, many scientists have created computer models, but the models have some limitations.

Now, Ogunjimi et al. report a new individual-based model to assess the effect of childhood varicella vaccination on shingles cases that factors in the immune responses to varicella infection. The model suggests that re-exposure to the varicella virus through contact with infected people would only provide extra protection for about two years; this is much shorter than previous predictions that suggested it might last 20 years. The model also predicts that implementing a varicella vaccination program for children would almost double the number of shingles cases 31 years later. But this increase would be temporary.

The predicted increase in shingles cases is likely to disproportionately occur among 31- to 40-year-olds. This is unexpected because most previous models predict that older age groups would bear the brunt of a rise in shingles, but this younger population would be less likely to develop lasting complications of shingles. Together, these findings may allay some fears about implementing childhood varicella vaccination programs by showing that the benefits of re-exposure are limited.

Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) causes the itching, erythematous vesicular disease called varicella or chickenpox, mainly during childhood, and remains latent in neural ganglia afterwards. Latency can then be interrupted by episodes of (primarily subclinical) reactivation of VZV as shown by the detection of VZV in saliva or blood from otherwise healthy individuals (Schünemann et al., 1998; Nagel et al., 2011). VZV reactivations may also cause herpes zoster (HZ), which presents clinically as a painful dermatomal rash. HZ occurs most frequently in individuals with a drastically declined cellular immune status (Dolin et al., 1978), but ageing itself is often assumed to substantially reduce resilience of the VZV-specific immune response (Miller, 1980; Berger et al., 1981; Levin et al., 2003, 2008). Recent research supports the hypothesis that waning of VZV cellular mediated immunity (CMI) by age is also influenced by cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection (Ogunjimi et al., 2014).

Effective and safe pediatric vaccines against varicella exist and have been universally implemented in some countries including the US, Australia, Greece, Germany, Japan and Taiwan (Marin et al., 2008). However, in many other countries policy makers have been hesitant to introduce childhood VZV vaccination due to the general population's perception of varicella as a relatively mild disease, as well as the so-called exogenous boosting hypothesis (Hope-Simpson, 1965; Ogunjimi et al., 2013). This hypothesis is based on the concept of the secondary immune response and assumes that boosting of VZV-CMI occurs upon re-exposure to varicella. Boosted VZV-specific cellular immunity would subsequently reduce the risk of VZV reactivation and thence HZ. The introduction of widespread childhood VZV vaccination would reduce opportunities for varicella re-exposure and could therefore increase HZ incidence, as shown in model-based projections (Schuette and Hethcote, 1999; Brisson et al., 2000; Bilcke et al., 2013). Although current data on HZ-incidence post introduction of childhood VZV vaccination has caused controversy, a systematic review rating the quality of the evidence, concluded that exogenous boosting exists, but that its population-wide effect after widespread childhood VZV vaccination remains highly uncertain (Ogunjimi et al., 2013). One of the main points of criticism on current predictions by deterministic VZV simulation models is the entanglement of exogenous boosting, waning of immunity, immunosenescence and reactivation undermining the possibility of estimating the magnitude and duration of exogenous boosting accurately. A concern is that these entangled parameters can be chosen to fit these models well to observed HZ incidence data, but that they are too artificial to allow real and verifiable biological interpretations. This leads to currently unverifiable and potentially poor predictions of VZV dynamics beyond the fitted equilibrium states. An additional, hitherto ignored uncertainty, is the potential occurrence of endogenous boosting by subclinical VZV reactivation. Indeed, some studies have shown VZV to reactivate subclinically both in healthy individuals, immunocompromised and stressed individuals (Schünemann et al., 1997; Mehta et al., 2003; Nagel et al., 2011). However, the effect on VZV-CMI has not yet been quantified.

In the current paper, we describe the first individual-based VZV model, explicitly combining within and between-host dynamics. This model is based on experimental viro-immunological data and allows an accurate estimation of the exogenous boosting characteristics and explicit insertion or validation of experimental data.

It is hypothesized that exogenous re-exposure to varicella increases VZV-specific cellular immunity (VZV-CMI). This natural consequence of the secondary immune response will reduce an individual's risk for HZ. When the probability of contact per unit-time between currently infectious and previously recovered varicella patients reduces, through a reduction in varicella incidence, it can be expected that HZ incidence temporarily increases due to a lack of exogenous boosting (Hope-Simpson, 1965; Ogunjimi et al., 2013).

To our knowledge, this study is the first to use an individual-based dynamic transmission model for VZV. This model allowed us to combine immunological and virological data to estimate key parameters in VZV population dynamics, such as the peak CMI response following re-exposure, duration of boosting and VZV subclinical reactivation characteristics. This means that in contrast to the deterministic models where abstract and ad hoc compartments are created to define the transition between different epidemiological states (for example the transition of a varicella recovered state to a zoster susceptible state), we can actually work with true biological, and verifiable, concepts such as VZV-CMI. Our best fitting parameter sets for Belgium suggest the effective duration of exogenous boosting to last only between 1 and 2 years. These predictions are significantly lower than those from the highly cited deterministic VZV model by Brisson et al., in which the average duration was predicted to be 20 years ([7–41 years] 95%CI) (Brisson et al., 2002). Our peak immunological response was estimated to be 2.8–4.0 times larger than the pre-re-exposure value. These predictions are consistent with those experimentally found in adults re-exposed to VZV by varicella contacts in the household (Arvin et al., 1983; Vossen et al., 2004) or by vaccination (Levin et al., 2008). A possible limitation of our study was that all close contacts with varicella patients were assumed to exert an equal ‘average’ boosting effect on the exposed individual. Future studies could assess how important it would be to incorporate variability in the impact of an exposure through direct contact with a varicella case, based on characteristics of both the exposed and the infectious person (e.g., age, comorbidity).

The VZV reactivation probability was estimated to be 5% per week. Observed data on VZV reactivation probability are rather sparse and highly divergent regarding study design, sampling site (saliva, blood, cerebrospinal fluid) and results (Schünemann et al., 1997; Mehta et al., 2003; Engelmann et al., 2008; Birlea et al., 2011; Nagel et al., 2011; van Velzen et al., 2013). The observed weekly VZV reactivation probability is a topic of discussion in the literature and varies between 0 and 71%. As such it is difficult to compare our estimates with the range of observed values. We also note that VZV reactivation in our model might only be detectable at the neural ganglia at not (always) necessarily in peripheral tissues. In order for HZ to occur, we assumed that VZV-CMI should be below a relative threshold (following a specific distribution) during VZV reactivation. None of our best fitting parameter sets predicted a significant effect of VZV reactivation on VZV-CMI, implying that endogenous boosting most likely does not have an impact on the occurrence of HZ. This finding is important since the existence of endogenous boosting has been proposed to have an effect in reducing the negative effects of varicella vaccination on HZ incidence. Future experimental studies should focus on confirming our predicted VZV reactivation probability and the lack of endogenous boosting.

The annual decline of VZV-CMI was predicted to be between 1 and 1.5%. This result is lower than the 2.7–3.9% experimentally observed by Levin et al. for individuals older than 60 years (Levin et al., 2008). The twofold difference in waning rate can be explained by the explicit disentanglement of waning and boosting (with younger age groups having—on average—higher probabilities of being boosted recently thereby actually increasing the observed waning rate). A limitation in our study is the use of a fixed waning rate for all ages. Our results might be interpreted as an averaged result of lower waning rates for younger age groups and higher waning rates for older age groups (as documented by Levin et al. (2008)). A higher waning rate in older age groups could for example be caused by chronic CMV infection (Ogunjimi et al., 2014). Although different types of waning (both in model specification and age dependency) can be used in this kind of simulation models, we believe that further experimental data documenting VZV specific cellular memory as a function of age is needed so that new waning models can be appropriately formulated. One future avenue of research could be the fitting of our predicted VZV-CMI to observed VZV-CMI data, as this will be a mixture of waning, immunosenescence and boosting. Better VZV-CMI datasets than those currently available are needed to be able to do this. These datasets could and should contain immune responses against different VZV peptides and could differentiate between the different cellular immunity compartments (CD4 vs CD8 and central vs effector memory cells). The use of our VZV IBM could help us identify which VZV-CMI compartment is of importance in controlling HZ.

We used our best fitting models to analyze the effects of a 100% effective varicella vaccine implemented for all 1-year-old children. We predicted a net increase in HZ incidence during 50 years and a 1.75 peak fold increase 31 years after introduction of the vaccination program. This delay in the HZ peak incidence is caused by cohorts born close to the time varicella vaccination was introduced experiencing less repeated boosting instances during their childhood than previously born cohorts (a mechanism that is similar to the progressive immunity model proposed in the deterministic VZV model by Guzzetta et al. (2013)). Although increases in HZ incidences following universal childhood varicella vaccination have been noticed, some authors have attributed these increases to a background evolution that was already present prior to CP vaccination (see discussion in Ogunjimi et al. (2013)). However, our analysis shows that proper documentation of significant increases in HZ incidence might not be possible during the first 10 years, even if a 100% effective vaccine would be used. For instance, during the first 10 years of the US program, both uptake and efficacy with the initial single dose vaccination programme were far below 100%. Although our model predicts a much lower duration of boosting than used hitherto in compartmental models (Ogunjimi et al., 2013), some of our overall HZ projections are qualitatively similar. However, in contrast to earlier model estimates our VZV IBM predicts that 31–40 year olds contribute the most to the peak in HZ incidence following varicella vaccination. Some observational studies found no effect of varicella vaccination on HZ incidence for those aged 60 years and older (Hales et al., 2013). This could be compatible with an overall HZ incidence increase due to rising HZ incidence among 31–40 year olds. Importantly, younger adults have been shown to be less likely to develop post-herpetic neuralgia (Opstelten et al., 2002; Drolet et al., 2010). Thus although our aggregated predictions regarding the increase in HZ incidence following varicella vaccination may appear similar to those published using deterministic models, cost-effectiveness analyses using our VZV IBM would be more in favor of universal childhood varicella vaccination.

A major benefit of our modeling approach is the possibility to verify our best–fit parameter values via experimental studies, or vice versa, to adapt parameter values when empiricism delivers new insights. For example, if a new experimental study would prove the existence of endogenous boosting, this could be readily implemented in our VZV IBM so that parameter sets could be estimated, conditional on the existence of endogenous boosting. Although our IBM has given us valuable insights into between-host and within-host VZV dynamics, other influential factors could be introduced in future versions. These factors could relate to CMV-immunosenescence (Ogunjimi et al., 2014), maternal antibodies, reduced VZV-CMI induction if infected during the first year of life as this might improve the prediction of the teenage group (Terada et al., 1994), co-infection with other viruses (Ogunjimi et al., 2015), risk groups (for e.g., immunosuppressed individuals) and HLA types (Meysman et al., 2015). Although current deterministic compartmental models should be able to partially account for these effects, a VZV IBM seems better suited to directly model the influence of these immunity-perturbing factors. Future VZV IBM should also explore more realistic vaccination scenarios as well as inter-country variability (Poletti et al., 2013).

We conclude that our VZV individual-based model has explicitly estimated the duration of exogenous boosting to be limited to only 1 or 2 years and that there was no significant effect from endogenous boosting.

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Author details

1. Benson Ogunjimi

   1. Centre for Health Economics Research and Modeling Infectious Diseases, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
   2. Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium

   Contribution

   BO, Conception and design, Acquisition of data, Analysis and interpretation of data, Drafting or revising the article

   For correspondence

   benson.ogunjimi@uantwerp.be

   Competing interests

   The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0831-2063

2. Lander Willem

   1. Centre for Health Economics Research and Modeling Infectious Diseases, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
   2. Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium
   3. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

   Contribution

   LW, Conception and design, Acquisition of data, Analysis and interpretation of data, Drafting or revising the article

   Competing interests

   The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

3. Philippe Beutels

   1. Centre for Health Economics Research and Modeling Infectious Diseases, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
   2. Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium
   3. School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

   Contribution

   PB, Conception and design, Acquisition of data, Analysis and interpretation of data, Drafting or revising the article

   Competing interests

   The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

4. Niel Hens

   1. Centre for Health Economics Research and Modeling Infectious Diseases, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
   2. Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and Statistical Bioinformatics, Hasselt University, Hasselt, Belgium

   Contribution

   NH, Conception and design, Acquisition of data, Analysis and interpretation of data, Drafting or revising the article

   Competing interests

   The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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