ArticleBMC medicine2026
Clinical impact and cost-effectiveness of vaccinating infants and adolescents against invasive meningococcal B disease in the Netherlands.
Article in BMC medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundInvasive meningococcal B disease (IMD-B) causes morbidity and mortality among infants and adolescents in the Netherlands. While multiple vaccines against IMD-B are licensed by the European Medicines Agency, none of them is currently part of the Dutch National Immunization Program (NIP). We evaluated the clinical impact and cost-effectiveness of different IMD-B vaccination strategies for Dutch infants and adolescents.
methodsWe developed a static, single-cohort Markov model to estimate the lifetime number of IMD-B cases and deaths prevented, as well as the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), of vaccinating infants with 4CMenB (age 0; 2 + 1 schedule) or adolescents with 4CMenB, MenB-fHBp, or MenABCWY + MenB-fHBp (age 15; 1 + 1 schedule), compared with no IMD-B vaccination. The analysis adopted a societal perspective, including costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) related to vaccination, adverse events, acute IMD-B, long-term sequelae, productivity losses of patients and caregivers, special education needs, and out-of-pocket expenses for patients and their families. We also conducted a threshold analysis for the incidence of IMD-B and a systematic uncertainty assessment.
resultsFor infants, the use of 4CMenB would prevent 11.14 IMD-B cases and 0.85 IMD-B-related deaths in one birth cohort of 166,073 infants over a lifetime. For adolescents, IMD-B vaccination would prevent 7.24-8.57 cases and 0.25-0.29 deaths in a single cohort of 197,782 adolescents, depending on which vaccine is used. The ICER was €594,056/QALY for 4CMenB in infants, while for adolescents the ICER ranged between €717,287/QALY and €890,023/QALY, depending on the vaccine type used. These ICERs exceed the commonly used cost-effectiveness thresholds (€20,000 to €80,000/QALY gained) in the Netherlands, rendering vaccination not cost-effective. This outcome proved robust in deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analyses, as well as in scenario analyses. The threshold analysis demonstrated that IMD-B vaccination may only become cost-effective at a €80,000/QALY threshold with more than a sixfold increase in incidence.
conclusionsThe modelled IMD-B vaccination programs resulted in the prevention of limited morbidity and mortality at a high financial burden. The inclusion of any of the evaluated vaccines in the Dutch NIP for infants or adolescents is not cost-effective in any target group at conventional Dutch cost-effectiveness thresholds given current IMD-B incidence levels.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.