Health professionals recently reported that when people say no to influenza vaccines, it costs others their lives.
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Since statin use was not randomly assigned in the studies, Dr. Jacob Udell from the University of Toronto and Dr. Orly Vardeny of the University of Wisconsin in Madison believe there might be other factors reducing the effectiveness of flu vaccines in statin-taking patients such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, among others, MedPage Today shared.
She said that precaution is especially true for anyone who spends time around newborns since they can not get flu shots until they are least 6 months old.
In one of the studies, a team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital looked at data from 7,000 people over the age of 65 who got flu vaccines over nine years.
Flu is a highly contagious disease, easily spread via droplets made when people with flu cough, sneeze or talk. It turned out that those who took statins had produced fewer antibodies.
A second team reviewed the cases of almost 140,000 people enrolled in a large managed care organization in Georgia.
Statins are typically used by 48 percent of the US population, mainly to control levels of cholesterol, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’ve focused for many years on using individual data sources for tracking a range of diseases, said study senior author John Brownstein, PhD, Boston Children’s chief innovation officer, in a statement accompanying the study’s release”. They also hope to produce a publicly available flu prediction tool based on their models.
“Instead, the results of these studies should be viewed as hypothesis-generating and should prompt further investigations into whether statins reduce inactivated influenza vaccine immunogenicity and, if so, the mechanisms by which immune responses and associated vaccine effectiveness are adversely affected”, the commentary authors wrote.
In another study, vaccine effectiveness at preventing serious respiratory illness was lower among patients taking statins compared to patients who were not on statins. “It is not a huge effect but it is notable”, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt Medical School and a spokesman for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Dr Saad Omer, Associate Professor of Global Health, Epidemiology, & Pediatrics at Emory University says using stalin drugs may lower the efficacy of vaccines including flu vaccine.
The philosophy of Rapid City Regional Hospital is that the best way to prevent the flu is to get vaccinated every year.
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In any given year flu kills between 3,000 and 49,000 people, and 80 to 90 percent of them are over 65. “So it’s good to vaccinate ourselves as well as encourage community members to get vaccinated as well”. “We know that flu vaccines decrease the risk of influenza and complications from influenza infection and should be taken”.
