Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment (a) his Department and (b) the NHS has made of a potential connection between chicken pox and stroke in children.

The Department has made no assessment of the link between chicken pox and stroke in children; research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University College London in 2013, suggested that children who experience chickenpox are at a four‐fold increased risk of ischaemic stroke in the subsequent six months, although the study recognised that this was still only a small absolute stroke risk, due to the low baseline incidence of paediatric stroke.

Research by the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, funded by the National Institute for Health Research and the Stroke Association has identified that a patient’s risk of stroke significantly increased following shingles.