Despite compelling evidence that the shingles vaccine is effective in elderly adults, clinical use of the vaccine remains “disappointingly low,” a new study shows.
Lead author Sinéad M. Langan, MD, from the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, and colleagues studied the vaccine in a randomly chosen group of Medicare enrollees. The vaccine’s effectiveness has previously been documented in selected insured populations and among people with certain immune-mediated conditions, “but not among an unselected population in a clinical setting,” the authors explain in their article, published online April 9 in PLOS Medicine.
From January 1, 2007, through December 31, 2009, the researchers studied people aged 65 years or more drawn from the 5% random Medicare Standard Analytic Files, which provides a random sample of
Read the rest of this article on Medscape: Shingles Vaccine Effective but Underused in Elderly.
