NURSING HOME RESIDENTS MAY LOWER CHANCES OF GETTING HOSPITALIZED THROUGH ADJUVANTED FLU VACCINES
Nursing home residents are the ones subject for frequent hospitalization, knowing that they are now old and their immune response is getting weak and fragile, so from time to time they need serious medical monitoring.
How can we reduce their frequent hospitalization rates, complications and eventually lower costs spent on medication?
According to study findings presented at IDWeek, giving long-stay nursing home residents an adjuvanted trivalent influenza vaccine may reduce their risk for hospitalization compared with a non-adjuvanted trivalent influenza vaccine.
Pneumonia and influenza are the leading vaccine-preventable infections in nursing homes and said more immunogenic vaccines, such as the adjuvanted trivalent influenza vaccine (aTIV), can improve clinical outcomes in nursing home patients, Stefan Gravenstein , MD, MPH, professor of medicine and health services, policy and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, and colleagues noted.
?Vaccine efficacy to all vaccines declines with age,? Gravenstein said in an interview. ?So, the lingering question is, Is increased immunogenicity sufficient to reduce clinical impact even in the oldest, frailest adults? That question is germane especially for the adjuvanted flu vaccine, which lacks randomized control trial evidence for better clinical outcomes in older adults, although it?s licensed specifically for this age group.?
In order to determine whether aTIV or the standard seasonal trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) is more effective for nursing home residents, Gravenstein and colleagues randomly assigned 823 nursing homes within 75 miles of a CDC influenza reporting city to offer either aTIV or TIV as their standard vaccine for the 2016-2017 influenza season.
With the number of residents vaccinated of over 17,976 and 18,364, respectively, from a sample of patients included 26,300 residents in 412 nursing homes assigned to offer aTIV and 26,474 residents in 410 nursing homes that offered TIV the researchers found:
- There were 5,479 (20.8%) hospitalizations in the aTIV nursing homes and 5,839 (22.1%) in the TIV nursing homes.
- In the aTIV nursing homes, 18.2% of residents died compared with 17.5% of residents in the TIV nursing homes.
Gravenstein and colleagues concluded that aTIV may reduce hospitalization risk for long-term nursing home residents during a predominantly influenza A/H3N2 season, despite reported reduced effectiveness due to egg-based vaccine mutations.
Erudite Nursing Instritute? encourages nursing researchers to further develop the study through establishing new research collaborations with other medical professionals, to reduce frequent hospitalization rates and complications of nursing home residents and eventually lower costs spent on medication.
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