Determination of antibody responses of elderly adults to all 23 capsular polysaccharides after pneumococcal vaccination.

The 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine was formulated to prevent invasive infection in the elderly and other high-risk populations from the most prevalent Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes. However, the immunogenicity of all 23 vaccine polysaccharides has not been fully characterized in elderly adults. We previously reported that whereas the majority of elderly subjects had vigorous immune responses to selected pneumococcal vaccine polysaccharides, a subset of elderly individuals responded to fewer than two of seven vaccine serotypes after immunization. To determine whether these elderly low responders have a general inability to respond to pneumococcal vaccine and to determine whether elderly low responders might be identified by their responses to a few polysaccharides, we measured antibody responses of elderly adults to all 23 vaccine polysaccharides after pneumococcal immunization. As a group, elderly subjects showed a significant rise after immunization in geometric mean antibody levels to all 23 vaccine serotypes. However, when individual rather than group immune responses were assessed, the 23-valent vaccine did not appear to be uniformly immunogenic in these elderly subjects. Eleven elderly subjects (20%) had twofold increases in specific antibody after vaccination to only 5 or fewer of the 23 vaccine polysaccharides, and they did not respond to the most prevalent serotypes causing invasive disease. Antibody responses to serotype 9N were found to reliably distinguish low vaccine responders from other elderly subjects. However, no particular group of vaccine polysaccharides could be used as a marker for adequate immune responses if only postvaccination sera were analyzed.