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Abstract
Objectives Genital human papillomavirus (HPV) infections and associated precancerous lesions adversely affect health-related quality of life (HRQoL). HPV vaccines provide effective protection against these conditions. We therefore investigated the impact of HPV vaccination on HRQoL in young women five years after participation in a phase III HPV vaccination trial.
Methods A total of 4808 originally 16- to 17-year-old Finnish girls had participated in the PATRICIA trial and received either bivalent HPV 16/18 vaccine or hepatitis A-virus (HAV) vaccine in 2004 to 2005. Unvaccinated girls (n = 9602), from adjacent birth cohorts, had participated in the control cohort in 2005. From 2009 to 2011, at 22 to 23 years of age, all participants received a questionnaire consisting of two generic HRQoL instruments (RAND36 and EQ VAS) and a disease-specific questionnaire (CECA10).
Results We analysed responses of 1143 HPV 16/18-vaccinated, 980 HAV-vaccinated, and 3753 unvaccinated young women. The unadjusted mean outcome measures of the different HRQoL estimates were similar in the three different responder cohorts.
Conclusions Five years after vaccination the health-related quality of life of HPV 16/ 18- vaccinated young women did not differ from those of HAV-vaccinated or unvaccinated controls representing the general population.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank all participants and staff from the PATRICIA trial for making the study possible.
Declaration of interest: Matti Lehtinen, Dan Apter and Jorma Paavonen have received grants through their employers, from GSK Biologicals and Merck & Co., Inc., for HPV vaccination studies. Dan Apter and Jorma Paavonen have received travel grants from GSK Biologicals and Merck & Co. Saku Torvinen is an employee of GlaxoSmithKline, Inc. The other authors have no competing interests. The authors alone are responsible for the content and the writing of the paper.