Work package 1 aims to deliver a comprehensive understanding of the epidemiology, risk factors, and burden of vaccine-preventable diseases in aging adults across European countries, via a consistent, comprehensive data collection approach that builds on and extends existing information.
Based on the different outputs, it has been decided by the Consortium to focus on:
- A retrospective pilot study on Pneumococcal pneumonia (PP) and Invasive extra-intestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli Disease (IED).
- A pilot longitudinal prospective case-control study, Aged European population Quality of Life in Infectious diseases (AEQUI), which aims to assess the impact of Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) and bacteremia hospitalization on quality of life, frailty, and disability in the aging population.
- A statistical model to predict immuno senescence using data of the influenza like illness (ILI) cohort in which elderly were followed for 3 winter seasons for development of.
Processed data
For the retrospective study, data of both regions have been processed and analytical tables have been produced and validated. Results on burden of diseases (incidence rates, recurrence rates, mortality rates, YLL, YLD and DALY) of IED and PP has been validated. Some challenges in statistical methodology related to DALY estimation have been discussed during the Retrospective study team weekly meeting, for example, the differences in ICD coding practices between Valencia and Denmark. These differences require adjustments to the clinical case definitions for both datasets based on available data.
Manuscripts in the making
Preliminary results for both Valencia and Denmark were included in the interim report of the pilot study which was submitted to the Innovative Medicines Initiative by June 2024. P95 together with FISABIO and SSI team are drafting two manuscripts on (1) the incidence rate of IED and (2) the burden of PP/IED in two regions. The manuscript on the incidence rate of PP in two regions has been published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases in March 2024 (DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jiae088).
In the prospective AEQUI study, the recruitment of patients and patient follow-up has finished, with overall of 1968 patients in total. Preliminary analysis showed that hospitalisation for infectious diseases and non-infectious diseases had a similar impact on quality of life, contrary to the expectations. The Sanofi team has been working on the manuscript to report results from AEQUI study.
Poster presentation
The team from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI) has used retrospective data (2012-2013) to estimate vaccine effectiveness of the influenza vaccine among older adults (≥65 years) in the Netherlands, comparing Cox regression using calendar time on the whole cohort with test negative design in a sub-population with of influenza-like-illness symptoms. Results from this analysis were presented as poster presentation in the Nordic Conference of Epidemiology and Register-Based Health Research (NordicEpi 2024) in Copenhagen in June 2024. In the next steps, FHI team will working with larger dataset from FISABIO to validate this Immunosenescence model.
