according to an analysis of a national survey.
Preventing a common infection also ranked highly as a reason for giving the vaccine, as did appeals to the vaccine’s lasting benefits and safety, the analysis showed.
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The findings strongly support prioritizing cancer prevention as a reason for HPV vaccination, reported Melissa B. Gilkey, PhD, of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, Chapel Hill, and her associates.
“To achieve widespread coverage, healthcare providers need strategies for more effectively and efficiently communicating its value,” Dr. Gilkey and her colleagues reported in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
The findings were based on responses obtained in the Adolescent Cancer Prevention Communication Study, a 2016 online survey completed by 1,259 parents of adolescents.
A total of 1,177 parent were included in this analysis after excluding surveys that were incomplete with regard to questions on provider communication about HPV vaccination.
In the online survey, parents were asked to rank, from best to worst, a list of 11 reasons providers commonly give to encourage parents to consider HPV vaccination for their child.
Overall, parents ranked cancer prevention as the best reason for guideline-consistent HPV vaccination (beta = 2.07), followed by preventing a common infection (beta = 0.68), having lasting benefits (beta = 0.67), and being a safe vaccine (beta = 0.41).
The worst reasons, as ranked by these parents, were “your child is due for it” (beta = –1.08), “I got it for my own child” (beta = –0.98), and “it is a scientific breakthrough” (beta = –0.67).
Researchers hypothesized that parents with low vaccination confidence would have different preferences. While those parents did less often endorse cancer prevention and a few other questions, the variation was minor and resulted in few differences versus the overall parent rankings, according to Dr. Gilkey and her colleagues.
“Although parents with low confidence may find top reasons for HPV vaccination less compelling, they would not necessarily benefit from targeted messaging,” they wrote.
The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Gilkey and coauthors had no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.
SOURCE: Gilkey MB et al. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2018 Jul;27(7):762-7.