Effect of human papilloma virus vaccination on sexual behaviours among adolescent women in Rwanda: a regression discontinuity study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination coverage is one of the key approaches to preventing cervical cancer globally. However, some argue that HPV vaccine recipients may engage in risky compensatory sexual behaviours because of perceived protection afforded by the vaccine. Therefore, we investigated the impact of a wide-scale HPV vaccination programme on sexual behaviours among adolescent women in Rwanda-the first African country to implement a national HPV vaccination. We identified a cohort of women who were eligible for the HPV vaccination and those who were not eligible from the most recent Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey. We used a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design, exploiting the quasi-random change in HPV vaccination eligibility in 2011, to compare sexual behaviours among vaccinated and unvaccinated adolescent women. We studied the impact of the vaccination on reported sexual intercourse, average number of sexual partners and teenage pregnancy across the vaccination eligibility threshold. Our analysis included 3052 adolescent women (mean age: 18.6 years), of whom 58% were eligible for HPV vaccination. Nearly one in five adolescents reported having had sexual intercourse (18.5%). The average reported lifetime number of sexual partners was 1.41. The proportion of teenage pregnancy was 5.3%. We found no evidence that HPV vaccination was associated with any significant changes across the eligibility threshold in reported sexual behaviours we studied: no significant increase in the proportion of having sexual intercourse [odds ratio (OR): 0.80, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.57-1.12; P = 0.19], in lifetime number of sexual partners (rate ratio 0.99, 95% CI: 0.83-1.17, P = 0.91) and in the proportion of teen pregnancies (OR 1.05, 95% CI: 0.50 to 2.20, P = 0.89) at the eligibility threshold. The Rwandan national HPV vaccination programme did not increase sexual behaviours among adolescent women, assuaging concerns of engaging in risky compensatory sexual behaviours some have feared.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".