Cervical cancer vaccine benefits older women

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Cervical cancer vaccine benefits older women
Women ages 25 to 45 far less likely to be infected after shot, study says
Reuters


WASHINGTON - Older women can benefit just as much as younger women from Merck's Gardasil vaccine against cervical cancer, researchers in Colombia reported on Monday. They found that women ages 24 to 45 who had no history of cancer-causing genital warts or cervical disease were much less likely to become infected with the wart virus if they got the vaccine than women who got placebo jabs.
The study, published in the Lancet medical journal, points to a potentially lucrative new market for the vaccine against the human papilloma virus or HPV. Merck, which paid for the Colombian study, has also shown that Gardasil is 90 percent effective in preventing sexually transmitted warts in men. GlaxoSmithKline's rival vaccine Cervarix protects against two HPV strains and is used in Europe.Dr. Nubia Munoz of the National Institute of Cancer in Bogota and colleagues tested 1,900 women who got the recommended series of three Gardasil shots and 1,900 who got sham injections.

"Published work suggests that in the U.S.A., nearly 40 percent of men and women have married and divorced by 55 years of age, and that more than 25 percent of these people have remarried at least once," they added. "As the potential for HPV infection and disease exists in women in their third, fourth, and fifth decades of life, these women could benefit from prophylactic HPV vaccination." A mathematical model published in October showed that vaccinating older women against cervical cancer could cut rates in half for women through age 45.