Vaccination Patterns Among Pediatric Cancer Patients Treated with Vancomycin

Background: The improvement in survival among children diagnosed with malignancy over the past two decades has been a remarkable achievement. As a consequence of therapy most of these patients are immunocompromised and therefore at high risk of infections. Vaccination is important to prevent infectious diseases, especially for patients who will become vulnerable to infections. Methods: A multicenter retrospective study of patients from birth to 18 years who received ≥ 2 does of IV vancomycin between 01/2006 and 12/2012 was preformed using an EMR database. Cancer diagnoses were identified via validated hospital registry. These data could not be analyzed prior to September 8 due to time constrains for consultation with the data architect. Statistical analysis was performed in SASTM version 9.3 and R. Results: There were 259 cancer and 4727 cancer-free patients who received vancomycin over the study period. Of these, there were a total of 19 vaccinations among 9 patients with cancer and 3070 vaccinations for 1169 cancer-free patients. Patients with cancer were vaccinated less frequently than cancer-free patients (3.4% vs 24.7%,