Gardasil vaccine shown not to be a diabetes risk

Thu, 26 Jan 2012
The quadrivalent HPV vaccine (also known as Gardasil), taken by many adolescents and young adults, has been found not to trigger many autoimmune conditions, including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, after vaccination in young women.

The study from the United States, which was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, involved analysis of the health records of nearly 200,000 women aged between 9 and 26 years in California who received a dose of the quadrivalent HPV vaccine. There was no increase shown in 16 pre-specified autoimmune conditions for those women who took the vaccine to protect against genital warts as compared with those who were unvaccinated. If untreated, the problem can lead to cervical cancer in women and girls.

Lead author of the research, Chun Chao, commented "This kind of safety information may help parents with vaccination decisions."

He added "These findings offer some assurance that among a large and generalizable female population, no safety signal for autoimmune conditions was found following HPV4 vaccination in routine clinical use."

Previous studies on the HPV vaccine, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, based on clinical trials and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) have been known to have key limitations in how they assessed the safety of the vaccine, with trials usually involving a highly selected population with small sample sizes and VAERS lacking effective comparison groups.

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