While praising the overall study, Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt Medical School noted a few complications with the study.
"Students who are much more organized in their lives," and are more likely to get the flu vaccine, "are going to be the ones that go to class," he said. "The results are consistent with those from other studies. But looking at this paper, that would be the issue."
Minneapolis' Nichol conceded that while the message of the study remains, there were some difficulties in controlling how similar the unvaccinated and vaccinated groups of students were.
"There is always the possibility of what we call 'residual confounding' in a study that is not a clinical trial," she said.
While Nichol said she would encourage college students to get vaccinated against the flu, she stopped short of saying the CDC should change its flu shot recommendations to include everyone.
"I certainly believe that studies like this help to inform those discussions, as they consider whether or not we should expand recommendations into other groups," Nichol said.
Certainly, college students saw stronger benefits from the flu vaccine than other groups, particularly in years where the vaccine was not a great match with the dominant flu strain.
While comparing studies that looked at different results is difficult, the college students in the study appear to have fared better than the toddlers in a recent one that looked at some of the same seasons. In that study, vaccination did not appear to reduce hospital visits.
But that is to be expected.
"It's not inconsistent that these young vigorous adults who have vigorous immune systems might be better protected than those young children," Vanderbilt's Schaffner said.
He noted that the college students are more likely to have been exposed to the virus, meaning their immune systems are more primed.
While the University of Minnesota has its vaccine covered under the student health plan and St. Olaf College charges a small fee, researchers declined to make a comparison between the two institutions.
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