Effects of vaccination against COVID-19 on the emotional health of older adults
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the mental and emotional health of the elderly, especially those from low to middle-income countries. However, COVID-19 vaccination may reduce this influence. Therefore, we aimed to estimate the effect of vaccination against COVID-19 on the emotional health of older adults.
Methods: We selected a national, random, and stratified sample of non-hospitalized adults aged 60 to 79 years from Peru who intended to receive or had already received the COVID-19 vaccine during recruitment. During June and July 2021, the assessed outcomes were the fear, anxiety, and worry about COVID-19, general anxiety, and depression at baseline and after a month. We estimated the adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for each altered emotional health outcomes in those who had one and two doses, compared with those who were not vaccinated using multilevel logistic regression with mixed effects.
Results: We recruited 861 older adults with 20.8% of loss to follow-up. At baseline, 43.9% had received only one dose of the vaccine, and 49.1% had two doses. In the analysis during follow-up, those who had two doses had less fear (aOR: 0.19; CI 95%: 0.07 to 0.51) and anxiety to COVID-19 (aOR: 0.45; CI 95%: 0.22 to 0.89), compared to unvaccinated. We observed no effects in those with only one dose.
Conclusions: Two doses of COVID-19 vaccination in older adults improves their perception of COVID-19 infection consequences. This information could be integrated into the vaccination campaign as an additional beneficial effect.
Authors: Christoper A. Alarcon-Ruiz , Zoila Romero-Albino, Percy Soto-Becerra, Jeff Huarcaya-Victoria, Fernando M. Runzer-Colmenares, Elisa Romani-Huacani, David Villarreal-Zegarra, Jorge L. Maguiña, Moises Apolaya-Segura, Sofía Cuba-Fuentes
Corresponding author: Christoper A. Alarcon-Ruiz
Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information: This study was funded by the Dirección de Investigación en Salud, Instituto de Evaluación de Tecnologías en Salud e Investigación – IETSI, EsSalud, and the Gerencia de la Persona Adulta Mayor y Prestaciones Sociales, EsSalud. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of results, writing of the report, and in the decision to submit the article for publication.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Copyright: © 2022 Alarcon-Ruiz CA et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.