17-Year Study Shows Powerful Benefits From HPV Vaccine
Post Date: October 1, 2025 | Publish Date:
Study led by former Cincinnati Children’s teen health expert includes evidence of ‘herd immunity’
A long-term study of the HPV vaccine — introduced in 2006 to protect women from the leading cause of cervical cancer — shows that the benefits of the vaccine extend beyond those who personally receive a dose.
Details of a cross-sectional study involving 2,335 adolescent girls and young adult women, were published Sept. 29, 2025, in JAMA Pediatrics. The work was conducted primarily at Cincinnati Children’s and led by Jessica Kahn, MD, MPH, now with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
“There are two encouraging takeaways from our study,” Kahn says in an announcement about the study. “First, HPV vaccines work remarkably well in a real-world setting, even among women at high risk for HPV and who may not have received all vaccine doses. Second, we saw clear evidence of herd immunity, meaning when enough people are vaccinated, the vaccine indirectly protects unvaccinated people by reducing overall virus transmission. These results reinforce the potential of the HPV vaccine to prevent infection and, ultimately, eliminate cervical cancer globally.”
Among the findings: over the 17-year study period, HPV vaccination rates rose from 0% to 82%. As vaccination coverage increased, the rates of HPV infection dropped dramatically among vaccinated participants.
- Infections from HPV types covered by the 2-valent vaccine fell by 98.4%
- Infections from types covered by the 4-valent vaccine dropped by 94.2%
- Infections from types covered by the 9-valent vaccine declined by 75.7%
“Our analysis of the data indicates that those reductions in infection rates were primarily due to the vaccine’s introduction and not because of changes in sexual behavior or other factors,” says Aislinn DeSieghardt, MS, the paper’s first author and clinical research coordinator at Cincinnati Children’s. “I also want to thank the all the young women who participated in the study, who have meaningfully contributed to this research that has the potential to save more lives.”
Cincinnati Children’s co-authors also included Lili Ding, PhD. Collaborators included experts from the Indiana University School of Medicine, Western Reserve Hospital in Ohio, the National Cancer Institute and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Maryland, and McGill University in Montreal.
Read the full announcement from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
See also an accompanying commentary in JAMA Pediatrics about the vaccine
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