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Few women finished HPV vaccine regimen
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PHILADELPHIA — Only one-third of young, urban women eligible for the HPV vaccine initiated vaccination, and only one-third of those who initiated vaccination completed a full course.
As many as 29.5% of sexually active young women aged 14 to 19 years are infected with HPV, but they still are not taking full advantage of the HPV vaccine, said J. Kathleen Tracy, PhD, assistant professor of genomic epidemiology and clinical outcomes at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Tracy presented the results during the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference.
She and colleagues reviewed patient data collected at the University of Maryland Medical Center from August 2006 to August 2010. During that time, 9,658 women and girls aged 9 to 26 years who were eligible for the vaccine visited the clinic and 27.3% initiated vaccination. Tracy said 39.1% received a single dose, 30.1% received two doses and 30.8% completed vaccination.
Two-thirds of women who initiated vaccination were black, but blacks were less likely than whites to complete vaccination. Roughly 40% of white women in the study completed a full vaccination regimen compared with about 27% of black women.
Women aged 18 years and older were most likely to receive a single dose of vaccine.
“From a health behavior perspective, one of the challenges of this vaccine is that it requires three doses,” Tracy said in an interview. “It’s really easy when a patient is in the office to go ahead and start vaccination. It’s quite another thing to make sure you come back of your own accord for a second visit, and then a third visit.”
Because investigators were reviewing records, they did not have a chance to interview patients to determine why they did not finish vaccination. Tracy said it was crucial for physicians to impress upon their patients the importance of getting all three injections.
“The efficacy data indicate that you don’t get much protection from a single dose,” she said. “For the body to mount an adequate antibody response, you need at least two doses to have any kind of significant protection and three doses to be optimally protected.”
For more information:
- Tracy JK. PR-11. Presented at: the Ninth Annual AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference; Nov. 7-10, 2010; Philadelphia.