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HPV vaccine showing some protective effects for unvaccinated
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Routine use of human papillomavirus vaccine has resulted in decreased disease incidence of vaccine serotypes, and the vaccine is showing some herd immunity effect, according to a study from The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Jessica A. Kahn, MD, MPH, from the division of adolescent medicine, and colleagues reviewed data on 368 young, unvaccinated women between the ages of 13 and 26 years recruited from two primary care clinics in Cincinnati in 2006 and 2007. They compared that data with data on a separate group of 409 young women recruited in 2009 and 2010; more than half (59%) of whom had been vaccinated with quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) vaccine (Gardasil, Merck).
The prevalence of HPV subtypes contained the vaccine dropped from 31.7% to 13.4%, and the decrease was 69% among vaccinated participants and 49% for unvaccinated patients in the study, according to the study findings.
“The results are promising in that they suggest that vaccine introduction could substantially reduce rates of cervical cancer in this community in the future,” Kahn said in a press release about the study. However, she noted that despite the evidence of herd immunity demonstrated in her study, vaccination of all young women between the ages of 11 and 26 years is important to maximize the health benefits of vaccination. She also pointed out that the overall prevalence of HPV (including types not targeted by the vaccine) in the study was “extremely high, with nearly one in four unvaccinated study participants already positive.”
Most participants in the study were young, black women, and many had Medicaid insurance. Given this, and the fact that the single-center study was relatively small, larger studies with more representative samples are needed to definitively determine the public health impact of the HPV vaccine, the researchers noted.
Disclosure: Dr Kahn is co-chair of two HPV vaccine trials funded by the National Institutes of Health, but for which Merck is providing vaccine and immunogenicity testing. She also receives funding from the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine to (SAHM) chair a grant review committee to evaluate proposals for public health demonstration projects; the funding for the SAHM grant program is from Merck.
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