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Autoimmune reactions have long been a concern connected with Gardisil, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. It has become common for the vaccine to be recommended to adolescents and young adults to protect against sexually transmitted infections, which can also lead to cervical cancer in females.

Now, according to a recent Kaiser Permanente observational safety study that followed 189,629 girls ages 9 �" 26 after receiving the HPV vaccine, researchers did not find any increase in 16 pre-specified autoimmune conditions, compared to a matched group of unvaccinated females. The list of conditions included lupus, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, Hashimoto’s disease, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, immune thrombocytopenia, Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, Gillian-Barre syndrome, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, neuromyelitis optica, uveitis, optic neuritis, neuromyelitis optica and other demyelinating diseases of the central nervous system. 

The associations between Gardasil and autoimmune reactions were the result of case reports that had never before been confirmed by a large, controlled study. Previous safety data on the HPV vaccine had been collected from clinical trials, which usually include a highly selected population with very small sample sizes and too short a time for follow-up. Data had also been gathered from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, but it is difficult to determine from such reports, which lack a proper comparison group, whether the onset of the autoimmune condition may have preceded the vaccination. 

The Kaiser Permanente study’s findings can now offer some assurance to patients and their families that “among a large and generalizable female population, no safety signal for autoimmune conditions was found following HPV4 vaccination in routine clinical use,” says study lead author Chun Chao, PhD, in a Comtex press release. This study used in-depth medical chart reviews to guarantee the accuracy of an autoimmune disease diagnosis, and whether the disease appeared after the vaccination.

This is good news, especially in correlation with the recent publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association article, which reports that seven percent of U.S. teens and adults carry the HPV virus in their mouths. Some HPV infections are harmless, but others can cause oral cancers.

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