WASHINGTON – Most parents know whether they want to vaccinate their child before the child is even conceived, a study showed.
“Is giving [vaccine] information out at … well-child visits in the pediatrician’s office too late? I think we’re still too early [in our research] to say if that’s the case,” said James N. Yarnall, a fourth-year medical student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The study grew out of talking to parents about their hesitancy toward the hepatitis B vaccine, recommended just after birth, said Mr. Yarnall, whose mentor, pediatrician Jacob Lohr of University of North Carolina Health Care, began asking parents why they were turning down the vaccine.
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Two-thirds of first-time parents reported developing immunization preferences before conception.
“For a lot of them, they said, ‘We’ve known for a long time,’ ” Mr. Yarnall said.
The two gave surveys to 171 parents (56% of the 304 they asked) who had given birth to a child between February and April 2015 at the University of North Carolina Women’s Hospital in Chapel Hill. The parents answered the question, “When did you develop your preferences for all/certain vaccines for your new baby?”
Among all the parents, 72% said they had developed their vaccination preferences for their newborn before the child had been conceived. The parents reported that friends and family, medical staff, and government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, played a role in their decisions about vaccines.
Two thirds (66%) of first-time parents reported developing immunization preferences before conception, while 77% of parents with previous children said they had, although the difference was not significant (P = .12). Fathers trended toward being slightly more likely than mothers to have decided their vaccine preferences preconception, but that finding was not significant and weakened further after demographic differences were accounted for.
Parents who had discussed vaccines with one another and who had higher levels of education also were more likely to have decided before conception whether they would vaccinate their newborn. Those who made their vaccine decisions before conception were significantly more likely to plan to vaccinate their children than to decline some or all vaccines (P = .01). Again, this finding was no longer significant following adjustment for demographic covariates.
Although these findings suggest that discussions about vaccines in the pediatrician’s office are coming long past the time when most parents have made up their minds, it’s less clear where to go from here, Mr. Yarnall said.
He and Dr. Lohr are working on a larger study with multiple sites through the Better Outcomes Through Research in Newborns (BORN) network to confirm these findings and determine what the next steps might be.
“We want to make sure the results from this pilot study are reproducible with more national sites,” Mr. Yarnall said. “Once we get those results, we can take it from there.”