Bacterial infections of the upper and lower respiratory tract are a frequent complication of influenza and contribute to the widespread use of antibiotics. Influenza vaccination may help reduce both appropriate and inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics. Electronic health records provide a rich source of information for assessing secondary effects of influenza vaccination.
We conducted a retrospective study to estimate effects of influenza vaccine on antibiotic (amoxicillin) prescription in the elderly based on data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink. The introduction of UK policy to recommend the influenza vaccine to older adults in 2000 led to a substantial increase in uptake, creating a natural experiment. Of 259,753 eligible patients that were unvaccinated in 1999 and aged≥65y by January 2000, 88,519 patients received influenza vaccination in 2000. These were propensity score matched 1:1 to unvaccinated patients. Time-to-amoxicillin was analysed using the Prior Event Rate Ratio (PERR) Pairwise method to address bias from time-invariant measured and unmeasured confounders. A simulation study and negative control outcome were used to help strengthen the validity of results.
Compared to unvaccinated patients, those from the vaccinated group were more likely to be prescribed amoxicillin in the year prior to vaccination: hazard ratio (HR) 1.90 (95% confidence interval 1.83, 1.98). Following vaccination, the vaccinated group were again more likely to be prescribed amoxicillin, HR 1.64 (1.58,1.71). After adjusting for prior differences between the two groups using PERR Pairwise, overall vaccine effectiveness was 0.86 (0.81, 0.92). Additional analyses suggested that provided data meet the PERR assumptions, these estimates were robust.
Once differences between groups were taken into account, influenza vaccine had a beneficial effect, lowering the frequency of amoxicillin prescribing in the vaccinated group. Ensuring successful implementation of national programmes of vaccinating older adults against influenza may help contribute to reducing antibiotic resistance.
The data used in this study are owned by the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (
The influenza vaccine has been shown to be effective in reducing the incidence of secondary respiratory infections [
Influenza vaccination effectiveness (IVE) in the elderly has been an ongoing subject of debate, with previous studies suggesting that much older patients gain less protection [
In this study, we assess the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine in reducing antibiotic prescription for acute respiratory infections amongst adults aged ≥65yrs using EHR data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD). In 2000 the UK introduced a policy to offer the influenza vaccination to all adults aged ≥65yrs. Health Protection England reported a vaccination level of 46% in 1999, 65% in 2000 and subsequent increase to current levels at >70% [
CPRD [
Mean (SD) or percentage reported.
Vaccinated Group | Control Group | |
---|---|---|
7.5% | 4.0% | |
7.1% | 4.4% | |
1.3% | 1.2% | |
73.3 (6.7) | 73.3 (6.6) | |
44.6% | 45.7% | |
74.4% | 74.7% | |
24.1% | 23.8% | |
1.6% | 1.5% | |
47.6% | 47.4% | |
10.0% | 10.4% | |
42.1% | 42.1% | |
9.6% | 8.7% | |
13.8% | 13.1% | |
0.9% | 0.8% | |
3.1% | 3.0% | |
5.0% | 4.9% | |
28.6% | 28.1% | |
5.3% | 5.1% | |
11.9% | 11.3% | |
2.7% | 2.5% | |
2.8% | 2.6% | |
5.2% | 5.0% | |
9.6% | 9.4% | |
1.8% | 1.6% | |
3.1% | 2.9% | |
0.6% | 0.6% |
Approval for the study was granted by the CPRD Independent Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC 14_159R2). Patient data received from CPRD is fully anonymised.
There are no outcome measures in primary care data that explicitly identify viral influenza infection; laboratory confirmed influenza is not well recorded in primary care and all-cause mortality is not considered useful [
To tackle bias arising from unmeasured confounding in EHR data, several methods have been proposed [
To assess IVE in a real-world setting, we apply Cox proportional hazards (PH) models, PERR and PERR Pairwise to CPRD data. Cox (PH) models were fitted to the outcome in the prior period and the study period. Hazard ratios (HRs) for the risk of antibiotic prescription in the vaccinated group vs the unvaccinated group are calculated for each time period, HRprior and HRstudy. Any difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups in the prior period (i.e. if the 95% confidence interval for HRprior does not include 1) is assumed to reflect unmeasured confounding.
The PERR methodology adjusts the HRstudy using the estimate of the underlying difference between the two groups identified in the prior period, HRprior, as follows:
The extension to this method, PERR Pairwise, uses a paired Cox regression and reduces bias found in the original formulation [
CRPD data were extracted using Stata v15.0 and analysed using R v3.0.2.
Previous work has proposed that negative control outcomes (NCO) [
Of those over 65yrs in our data, 38% (n = 515,580) received the influenza vaccination in 1999 and 56% in 2000 (n = 514,291); this is reasonably comparable to the increase in coverage reported by Public Health England. In our study population, the vaccinated group received a greater number of amoxicillin prescriptions in both periods than the control group,
The results from the propensity score-adjusted Cox PH model for the prior period showed a difference in the hazards between the vaccinated and control groups. The bias was not fully removed by matching on the propensity scores (which were derived from the measured confounders alone) (for the ≥ 65y cohort: HR 1.90 95% CI [1.83, 1.98];
The subgroups based on age showed similar results. More prescriptions were issued to the vaccinated groups in the prior period, 7.5% in <75yrs and 7.6% in ≥75yrs in the vaccinated group and 4.3% in <75yrs and 3.6% in ≥75yrs for the control group. Similarly, in the study period, rates of prescriptions were 7.0% and 7.1% for <75yrs and ≥75yrs respectively in the vaccinated group and 4.5% and 4.0% respectively in the control group. We again found evidence of a difference between the groups before the study period and Cox PH models for the study periods (
After adjusting for the prior period with the PERR methods, the artefactual association between oedema, our NCO, and influenza vaccination was eliminated, HR 1.05 (0.95,1.16) and 1.06 (0.95,1.19) for PERR and Pairwise, respectively (
In this study, we found evidence of a beneficial effect of influenza vaccination in reducing antibiotic prescribing in EHRs, by taking a robust approach to the problem of confounding and applying methods to adjust/mitigate for confounding bias. In the year that all ≥65yrs were first entitled to a free vaccination, having accounted for the prior period, vaccination reduced the risk of being prescribed antibiotics; those vaccinated had a 14% (8–19%) lower risk of being prescribed the commonest antibiotic used for respiratory infection than those who were not vaccinated. Those who were vaccinated in 2000 were different to the control group who were not vaccinated: in both periods the vaccinated group were at greater risk of being prescribed antibiotics; the HR for vacinees vs controls in the prior period being 1.90 (1.83,1.98) and 1.64 in the period after vaccination (1.58,1.71). Examining the period post-vaccination in isolation, resulted in a spurious estimate of IVE corresponding to a harmful effect of being vaccinated–in practice, patients due to accept influenza vaccination are more likely to be prescribed antibiotics for respiratory infections because of an increased likelihood of healthcare-seeking behaviour.
Given the strain of the influenza virus can vary from year to year, it is possible that not only will vaccination effectiveness vary but the influence of the confounders may also vary. Bias may be introduced into estimates from the PERR methods when the influence of unmeasured confounders on response is different in the prior and study periods. The PERR methodology also requires unmeasured confounders to be time invariant. Some advice should be taken prior to applying the PERR methodology about how comparable the prior and study periods are. In this case consultation with a virologist about the strains of influenza and their impact on health in the two seasons should inform study design. In this study, patients identified with a vaccine-free prior period could have a history of exposure to the vaccine thus potentially contaminating the prior period and reducing the performance of the method in adjusting for bias. However, a strength of the PERR methodology is that it allowed us to adjust for the prior incidence of antibiotic prescriptions and greatly reduce the imbalance between the two groups without full knowledge of the underlying confounders. A naïve model could use prior use of antibiotics as a covariate in the study model but this would not be as effective in reducing bias due to confounding as the PERR adjustment [
The simulation study showed where we could ‘trust’ our estimates of vaccine efficacy. Our simulations are novel in that they utilise biologically plausible baseline hazards and adding a small competing risk. In scenario 1, the PERR methods were robust to differences in the distributions of the continuous confounder in the vaccinated and control groups, provided they remained the same within each group over the two periods, whereas we found high bias in the Cox model in comparable settings.
In scenario 2, the confounding variable which influenced the groups changed between periods. We found biased estimates in this scenario, however confidence intervals still contained the true effect. Assuming our vaccinated and control groups did not change significantly in their underlying health between the two time periods, then our PERR estimates were valid. We attempted to capture health seeking behaviour that may contribute to variation in outcomes using the number of GP visits in one year as a covariate. This approach may fail to pick up where health seeking behaviour has changed over time and further work is required to investigate how best to incorporate these time dependent effects within the PERR framework. The simulation study scenario 3 showed that, if there were a subgroup who did not respond to vaccination, any analysis would be biased. We found no difference in response to vaccination due to age in our cohort which suggested that immunosenescence did not impact on the results.
Our study concentrated on amoxicillin prescription as an outcome to study reduction in antibiotic prescription following influenza vaccination. Incidence of influenza is poorly recorded in EHR data and proxies related to respiratory illness, such as amoxicillin prescription, provide a feasible alternative. Amoxicillin can be used for many different types of bacterial infections but we chose to use a sensitive outcome definition without restriction to amoxicillin prescriptions where there was an associated clinical code for respiratory illness. We note that some patients may have been allergic to penicillin and unable to receive amoxicillin. Amoxicillin is the most commonly prescribed antibiotic for respiratory illness [
Klugman and Black [
Our results did not find a diminished protective effect with age; 13% (6–19%) reduction in risk of prescriptions for <75 yrs and 16% (6–24%) in those ≥75yrs. Previous work has commented on the lack of evidence for effectiveness in much older people [
We have found evidence, using EHR data, that vaccinating patients aged at least 65 years against influenza reduces prescriptions of a common antibiotic used to treat respiratory infections. This effect still holds when looking at a subgroup of over 75years. Antibiotic resistance is a growing healthcare problem, the consequences of which include longer healthcare stays and more expensive healthcare costs. Our findings suggest that improving uptake of influenza vaccination in older patients can contribute to strategies to reduce antibiotic resistance.
(DOCX)
Click here for additional data file.
(PDF)
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(PDF)
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95% Confidence interval coverage of assessing change in continuous confounder distribution (an interval containing zero covers the true treatment effect).
(PDF)
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95% Confidence interval coverage of assessing change in continuous confounder distribution (an interval containing zero covers the true treatment effect).
(PDF)
Click here for additional data file.
Percentage labels indicate the percentage of patient who do not respond to the vaccination e.g. 50% half of the treated patients do not respond to the vaccine. 95% Confidence interval coverage of assessing change in continuous confounder distribution (an interval containing zero covers the true treatment effect).
(PDF)
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(DOCX)
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Figures are relative bias (%) of treatment effect across βtrt from analysis of data simulated from parameters under the three scenarios.
(DOCX)
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(DOCX)
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(DOCX)
Click here for additional data file.
The Age UK Project team at the University of Exeter for Read codes for the disease covariates.
PONE-D-20-35449
Impact of influenza vaccination on amoxicillin prescriptions in older adults: A retrospective cohort study using primary care data
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If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.
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Reviewer #1: Your outcome of interest (Amoxicillin use) is potentially too vague. Amoxicillin can be used for many different types of bacterial infections. It is not clear why you did not use diagnoses codes for respiratory infections.
Would also have used time-varying cox regression to assess vaccination status. You potentially have introduced immortal time into the vaccinated cohort.
Would be nice to see the covariates you matched on. Did you control for senility? You mention health seeking behavior. Can you think if any proxies that you could use to account for health seeking behavior?
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Response to editor comments
1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at
The paper has been updated to conform to PLOS ONE’s requirements.
2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.
If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.
We have added “Patient data received from CPRD is fully anonymised.” to our ethics statement section.
3. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section:
"I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: WH has a personal long-term shareholding in Glaxo Wellcome, who manufacture an influenza vaccine. WEH has previously received funding from IQVIA."
Please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors
Please include your updated Competing Interests statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.
Please know it is PLOS ONE policy for corresponding authors to declare, on behalf of all authors, all potential competing interests for the purposes of transparency. PLOS defines a competing interest as anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to one of the journals. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organization or another person. Please follow this link to our website for more details on competing interests:
We have updated our competing interests statement:
WH has a personal long-term shareholding in Glaxo Wellcome, who manufacture an influenza vaccine. WEH has previously received funding from IQVIA. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. Data are owned by the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (
4. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see
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The ethics statement has been moved to the end of the Study Cohort section of Materials and Methods
Response to reviewer comments
1. Your outcome of interest (Amoxicillin use) is potentially too vague. Amoxicillin can be used for many different types of bacterial infections. It is not clear why you did not use diagnoses codes for respiratory infections.
We thank the reviewer for this comment. There is difficulty is selecting an appropriate outcome measure in a study of influenza vaccination using electronic health records; outcomes must be related to the effect of the treatment and well recorded. As noted in the outcomes section of the paper, laboratory confirmed influenza is not well recorded in primary care and all-cause mortality is not considered a useful outcome. Influenza attacks the respiratory system and there is evidence of a reduction in respiratory illness due to influenza vaccination [Gross et al, Nichol et al, Monto et al]. As respiratory illnesses are difficult to diagnose precisely in early stages, patients, particularly the elderly, are often prescribed antibiotics. Antibiotic prescription is well-recorded in routine health records and may serve as a proxy for influenza presenting as a respiratory infection or possible bacterial infection complicating influenza[Kwong et al, Nichol et al, Harper et al]. Our chosen outcome in this study was prescription of amoxicillin, the first choice antibiotic recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for low or moderate severity community acquired pneumonia. Although we could have further qualified our outcome by only selecting amoxicillin prescriptions where there was an associated clinical code for respiratory illness, we chose to use a more sensitive definition in this exploratory study to maximise available sample size. Our choice of within-patient design (based on the PERR method) should ensure that we remove the effect of any differences in levels of amoxicillin prescription for non-respiratory infections between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. Text has been added to the Material and Methods Outcomes section to clarify our choice of outcome measure. Relevant amoxicillin codes were identified by a pharmacist. We acknowledge the limitations of our study in paragraph 3 of Strengths and Limitations section of the Discussion and agree further work should investigate this outcome measure further.
Gross PA, Hermogenes AW, Sacks HS, Lau J, Levandowski RA. The efficacy of influenza vaccine in elderly persons. A meta-analysis and review of the literature. Ann Intern Med 1995;123:518–27
Nichol KL, Treanor JJ. Vaccines for seasonal and pandemic influenza. J Infect Dis 2006;194 Suppl:S111–8. doi:10.1086/507544.
Monto AS, Hornbuckle K, Ohmit SE. Influenza vaccine effectiveness among elderly nursing home residents: a cohort study. Am J Epidemiol 2001;154:155–60.
Kwong JC, Maaten S, Upshur RE, Patrick DM, Marra F. The effect of universal influenza immunization on antibiotic prescriptions: an ecological study. Clin Infect Dis 2009;49:750–6. doi:10.1086/605087
Harper SA, Fukuda K, Uyeki TM, Cox NJ, Bridges CB. Prevention and control of influenza. Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). MMWR Recomm Rep 2005;54:1–40.
2. Would also have used time-varying cox regression to assess vaccination status. You potentially have introduced immortal time into the vaccinated cohort.
Although immortal time bias could be a potential problem with the PERR methodology as, by design, patients must be alive at the start of the study period, this issue has been addressed by previous authors including Tannen et al (2009) in response to a comment on their original paper. As with their original study design, our patients in both exposure groups had a predefined time interval to meet entry criteria for the study (no vaccination for two years prior to the study period). There was a large pool of unvaccinated patients (n=171274) who were matched to vaccinated patients based on the characteristics in Table 1. Their start date for the study period was effectively random as it was allocated by their matched vaccinated counterparts. Immortal time bias is introduced when the period of “immortality” before exposed patients receive treatment is either misclassified with regards to treatment status or excluded from the analysis. Neither of these issues apply here and Tannen et al point out that immortal time bias should not be an issue due to the careful choice of design. Furthermore, we have previously conducted a simulation study that showed the Pairwise PERR method is unbiased in the presence of differential case fatality because of the within-patient nature of the comparisons (Lin and Henley, 2016). We also note that the PERR framework set out by Lin and Henley (2016) allows for flexible modelling including use of multiple time-varying covariates and effects (Section 7.1). The version of the Pairwise PERR model that we use in this study does indeed allow for the time-varying effect of vaccination status.
Tannen Richard L, Weiner Mark G, Xie Dawei. Use of primary care electronic medical record database in drug efficacy research on cardiovascular outcomes: comparison of database and randomised controlled trial findings BMJ 2009; 338 :b81
Lin NX, Henley WE. Prior event rate ratio adjustment for hidden confounding in observational studies of treatment effectiveness: a pairwise Cox likelihood approach. Stat Med. 2016 Dec 10;35(28):5149–69.
3. Would be nice to see the covariates you matched on. Did you control for senility?
Subjects were matched on the covariates in Table 1. This has been clarified in Material and Methods Study Cohort section. We have matched on dementia to control for senility (Table 1).
4. You mention health seeking behaviour. Can you think if any proxies that you could use to account for health seeking behaviour?
We have tried to capture health seeking behaviour through including the number of GP visits over the 12 months of the prior period as a covariate. We have used the number of consultations within one year as a snap shot of health seeking behaviour and assumed this to be representative during our study. However, we acknowledge that a change in consultations over this time period may be indicative of changing health. A limitation of current PERR methodology is the assumption that any unmeasured confounders are time invariant. We have added to the discussion this limitation (paragraph two of strengths and limitations) and highlighted the need for further work.
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Impact of influenza vaccination on amoxicillin prescriptions in older adults: A retrospective cohort study using primary care data
PONE-D-20-35449R1
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PONE-D-20-35449R1
Impact of influenza vaccination on amoxicillin prescriptions in older adults: A retrospective cohort study using primary care data
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