Annual flu shots greatly lowers risk of dying for older adults
Staff Writer |
The current flu season is shaping up to be a nasty one, but there's good news for American seniors who've gotten their flu shot.
Article continues below
New research shows that for older adults, faithfully getting the vaccine each year greatly reduces the odds of catching a flu so severe that it lands you in the hospital.
Researchers found that repeated influenza vaccination offers a double benefit in older adults, proving 74 percent effective in preventing intensive-care (ICU) admissions and 70 percent effective in preventing deaths.
The findings bolster the notion that although getting a flu shot doesn't always prevent the flu, it can make it milder for those who do catch it, said study author Dr. Jesus Castilla. He's a researcher at the Navarra Institute for Health Research in Pamplona, Spain.
"We were surprised by the big magnitude of the vaccine effect in preventing severe influenza," Castilla said. "Our results show the importance of annual vaccination for preventing severe influenza in the older population."
"The prevention of severe influenza was mainly observed in patients repeatedly vaccinated in both the current and previous [flu] seasons, which reinforces the recommendation of annual influenza vaccination in the elderly," he added.
Millions of Americans catch the flu every year, resulting in hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Flu-related deaths ranged from 12,000 to 56,000 annually between 2010 and 2017, according to CDC estimates.
Older adults, whose immune systems aren't as robust, are more prone to suffering severe outcomes from flu infection, including hospitalization, complications and death, Castilla noted.
"Annual vaccination acts as a booster for their immune response," he said. "In other words, the protection increases as compared to the effect of vaccination in a single season."
The new research by Castilla and his colleagues involved hundreds of hospitalized patients, older than 65, who had influenza - both severe and less severe cases - as well as those who did not.
People who'd gotten a flu vaccination in the current and three previous flu seasons were half as likely to develop a severe case of the flu, the study found. ■