A Multivariate Age-Structured Stochastic Model with Immunization Strategies to Describe Bronchiolitis Dynamics

Mónica López-Lacort, Ana Corberán-Vallet and Francisco J. Santonja Gómez
Additional contact information
Mónica López-Lacort: Vaccine Research Department, Fisabio-Public Health, Avda. Cataluña 21, 46020 Valencia, Spain
Ana Corberán-Vallet: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Universitat de València, Dr. Moliner 50, 46100 Burjassot, Spain
Francisco J. Santonja Gómez: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Universitat de València, Dr. Moliner 50, 46100 Burjassot, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 14, 1-14

Abstract: Bronchiolitis has a high morbidity in children under 2 years old. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common pathogen causing the disease. At present, there is only a costly humanized monoclonal RSV-specific antibody to prevent RSV. However, different immunization strategies are being developed. Hence, evaluation and comparison of their impact is important for policymakers. The analysis of the disease with a Bayesian stochastic compartmental model provided an improved and more natural description of its dynamics. However, the consideration of different age groups is still needed, since disease transmission greatly varies with age. In this work, we propose a multivariate age-structured stochastic model to understand bronchiolitis dynamics in children younger than 2 years of age considering high-quality data from the Valencia health system integrated database. Our modeling approach combines ideas from compartmental models and Bayesian hierarchical Poisson models in a novel way. Finally, we develop an extension of the model that simulates the effect of potential newborn immunization scenarios on the burden of disease. We provide an app tool that estimates the expected reduction in bronchiolitis episodes for a range of different values of uptake and effectiveness.

Keywords: infectious diseases; bronchiolitis; respiratory syncytial virus; stochastic Bayesian model; multivariate age-structured model; immunization programs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7607/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/14/7607/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:14:p:7607-:d:596068

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().