The Immunologic Response to Anti-Hepatitis B Vaccination Among Medical Students of Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Guilan, Iran

Background and aims: an important way to prevent hepatitis b infection is vaccination especially among high-riskpopulations including healthcare workers. unfortunately, immunologic response to the vaccine is not perfect. multipledifferent factors such as gender, age, body mass index (bmi), smoking and underlying diseases can influence theimmunologic response. so, this study was conducted to evaluate the post-vaccination immunologic response of medicalstudents of guilan university of medical sciences (gums).methods: in this cross-sectional study, gums medical students who had received complete vaccine series at zero, one,and six months were enrolled. their demographic data and the factors which could probably alternate the immunologicresponse were collected by interview. the anti-hbs ab titer was evaluated by enzyme-linked-immunoassay (elisa).appropriate immunologic response was supposed to be hbsab >=10 miujml. the collected data were analyzed usingspss10.00.p value less than0.05 was considered significant.results: we evaluated 233 students with mean age of 24.9(plus-minus)4.5 years. 74.7% were female. 4.9% did not respondproperly to vaccination. females' immunologic responses were significantly higher than males' (p=0.001).responsiveness was significantly lower in smokers than non-smokers (p=0.02). mean age in inappropriate andappropriate responder groups were 28.67(plus-minus)5.4 and 24.77(plus-minus)4.4 years, respectively (p=o.004).conclusions: 95.1% of students had a protective level of anti-hbsab ((greater than)10 miujml). since health-care staffs includingmedical students are a high risk group to be contaminated with hbv, it is preferable to be evaluated for anti-hbs titer1-3 months after full three-dose vaccination especially when these factors are present; in this way the false sense ofbeing immunized among them may be decreased.