TY - JOUR T1 - A data-driven model for the assessment of age-dependent patterns of Tuberculosis burden and impact evaluation of novel vaccines JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/112409 SP - 112409 AU - Sergio Arregui AU - Joaquín Sanz AU - Dessislava Marinova AU - María José Iglesias AU - Sofía Samper AU - Carlos Martín AU - Yamir Moreno Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/28/112409.abstract N2 - Background Among all possible novel epidemiological interventions against tuberculosis (TB), improved preventive vaccines hold the promise of offering substantial reductions of TB burden worldwide. Accordingly, several vaccine candidates are currently under development, each of which, depending on their immunogenic properties, might show differences in protection when applied to different age groups.Methods We present a TB epidemiological model which, capitalizing on publicly available data from different sources (World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations (UN) Population Division and published studies on contact-patterns surveys at an international scale), formalizes a data-driven description of most relevant coupling mechanisms between populations' age structure and TB dynamics.Findings The global demographic shift projected by the UN for the next decades is to be accompanied, according to our results, by a shift in the age-distribution of TB burden in some of the regions most affected by the disease. We show that for Africa and the East Mediterranean this could lead to revert the projected global decline of TB unless novel epidemiological measures are deployed. Regarding the comparison of different vaccination strategies, an adolescent-focused global immunization campaign appears to be more impactful than newborn vaccination in the short term.Interpretation We demonstrated that TB indicators and vaccination strategies remarkably depend on how the disease dynamics is coupled to the demographic structure of the population. Capitalizing on a data-driven approach, we identified substantial biases in epidemiological forecasts that are rooted on an inadequate description of age-dependent mechanisms, among others. Our findings provide fundamental insights if novel age-focused epidemiological interventions, such as preventive vaccines, are to be considered and established. ER -