A study by Israeli scientists found that coronavirus infection is associated with an increased risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, while the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine is associated with a reduced risk. Study published In the magazine Neurology.
Guillain-Barré syndrome is an acute immune-mediated injury to the spinal and cranial nerve roots that results in progressive muscle weakness and paralysis. It often develops after infections, and sometimes even during vaccination, but the risk of its development after vaccination is significantly lower. Since the start of the covid pandemic, appear reports of symptoms characteristic of Guillain-Barre syndrome in the post-infectious period. However, it remained unclear whether SARS-CoV-2 could cause the syndrome or whether the reported cases could be considered a coincidence. The connection between Covid vaccines and the development of the syndrome also remained unclear.
Haya Bishara from the Carmel Medical Center and colleagues studied the risk of developing Guillain-Barre syndrome after a coronavirus infection or vaccination against it. To do this, the team studied a sample of more than three million patients, of whom 76 were diagnosed with the syndrome during follow-up. They were matched with 760 randomly selected control patients.
Of the 76 cases of the disease, eight patients had only Covid, seven had only vaccination against Covid using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and one had both infection and vaccination. These patients suffered all events within six weeks before the first symptoms of the syndrome. The mean age of patients with Guillain-Barré syndrome and matched controls was 56.3 years. Multivariate models showed that odds ratio for the development of infection-related syndrome was 6.30. For vaccination, this ratio was 0.41.
Although the sample in this study is small, multivariate statistical analyzes show a strong association between Covid and the development of Guillain-Barré syndrome. An important conclusion of this study is the reduction in the risk of developing the syndrome when vaccinated after Covid. In the future, scientists will have to find out the extent and mechanism of coronavirus’s participation in the development of the syndrome.
We recently talked about how Guillain-Barre syndrome caused the death of Alexander the Great.
2023-10-19 12:07:00
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