Reduced ovarian function in teen girls is not a potential effect of teen vaccination, found a new study. Researchers studied more than 200,000 adolescent girls to look for a possible link between primary ovarian insufficiency and any of the vaccines recommended for teens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV), tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), influenza and meningococcal disease.
No increased risk of primary ovarian insufficiency in girls occurred after they received the HPV, Tdap (tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis), MenACWY (four meningococcal disease types) or inactivated flu vaccines, the Pediatrics study found.
“If primary ovarian insufficiency is triggered by HPV or other adolescent vaccine exposure, we would have expected to see elevated incidence in the younger women who were most likely to be vaccinated, but instead we observed higher incidence in older women (older than 26 years of age), which is consistent with one other population-based study of primary ovarian insufficiency prevalence,” wrote Allison L. Naleway, PhD, of the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon, and her colleagues.
Primary ovarian insufficiency is sometimes called premature menopause—when ovarian stop releasing eggs—but approximately 5-10% of women with the condition can conceive and give birth, so it’s more accurately a reduced function of ovaries. Although rare — it occurs in just one of 1,000 women before age 30 — the condition can be devastating since it nearly always causes infertility.
Possible causes of primary ovarian insufficiency include genetic mutations, chromosomal problems, endocrine conditions, severe infection, pelvic surgery, and possible autoimmune effects, but the cause is often unknown. The fact that doctors often cannot identify its cause has contributed to fears among some people that vaccination, particularly the HPV vaccine, might be involved. A 2012 case report found that a 16-year-old girl who had been menstruating for three years experienced ovarian failure after getting the HPV vaccine, and another case series similarly described three girls diagnosed with the condition after their HPV vaccinations.