ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta) – Women who received the human papillomavirus vaccine may be more likely to be infected with another strain of the HPV virus than women who do not get the vaccine, a new study finds.
The researchers said that women will benefit more from getting another vaccine so they will be protected against all strains of the HPV virus.
“Vaccinated women who got the quadrivalent vaccine may get the nine-valent vaccine as further protection for them,” Fangjian Guo, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and a researcher on the study, told LiveScience.
Researchers analyzed data from almost 600 women between the ages 20 and 26, including 80 women who had received the original Gardasil HPV vaccine. That vaccine protects against only four types of HPV. HPV can lead to cancer.
Almost 90 percent of the women who received the Gardasil vaccine were less likely to be infected with the four strains of the virus included in the vaccine, according to the study.
However, the study found that over 60 percent of the women who received the Gardasil vaccine were more likely to be infected with the other types of HPV viruses.
The researchers took into account other factors, such as a person’s risk of HPV infection and how many sexual partners they had.
“If a woman is already infected with HPV, the HPV vaccine cannot eliminate this infection,” Guo noted in the study.
Guo said that more research is needed to determine a woman’s risk of developing cervical cancer if they were vaccinated but were to still become infected with a high-risk strain of HPV.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that all young boys and girls should get vaccinated when they are 11 or 12 years old. Vaccinations are available for males up to age 21 and females up to age 26 if they did not get vaccinated when they were younger.
The findings were presented at the meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. It has not been published yet.
