Chickenpox Vaccine Lowers Need for Hospital Care

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There has been a marked drop in chickenpox-related hospitalizations, office visits and related expenditures since a routine chickenpox vaccination program was started in the US in 1995, new research shows.

Previous reports have suggested that the program helped cut the rate of disease, but the impact on healthcare utilization was unclear, according to the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

To investigate, Dr. Fangjun Zhou, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed data from MarketScan databases, which included information on children and adults enrolled in more than 100 health insurance plans between 1994 and 2002.

During the study period, chickenpox hospitalizations fell 88 percent, from 2.3 to 0.3 cases per 100,000 population, while ambulatory visits dropped 59 percent, from 215 to 89 per 100,000 population. Although the greatest declines occurred in infants younger than 1 year, all age groups experienced a reduction.

In 1994 and 1995, the direct medical expenditures for chickenpox hospitalizations and ambulatory visits were estimated at $84.9 million. By 2002, this figure had dropped to $22.1 million.

"This is the first study, to our knowledge, to include both hospitalizations and ambulatory visits in the analysis of (chickenpox) healthcare utilization over a period that spanned the introduction and maturation of the...vaccination program in the US," the authors point out.

In a related editorial, Dr. Matthew M. Davis, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, comments that "to maximize the benefits of vaccines for children and adults in the future, it is imperative to formally and openly consider how best to incorporate cost-effectiveness considerations into deliberations about vaccine recommendations, thereby acknowledging that health and economics cannot be teased apart."

Journal of the American Medical Association, August 17, 2005.