Tokumasu, Kazuki, Fujita-Yamashita, Manami, Sunada, Naruhiko et al. · Vaccines · 2023 · DOI
Researchers at a specialized clinic in Japan studied 121 patients who experienced long-lasting symptoms after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. The most common symptoms were numbness or tingling sensations (28% of patients), extreme tiredness (25%), fever (17%), and headaches (17%). Some patients developed serious conditions including ME/CFS, and most symptoms started within a week of vaccination but lasted months or longer.
This study is relevant to ME/CFS patients because it identified ME/CFS as a serious complication in a subset of vaccination-related adverse event clinic patients, and characterizes a cohort experiencing prolonged fatigue and neurological symptoms. For researchers, it provides clinical descriptors of post-vaccination persistent symptoms that may inform case definitions and phenotyping in investigation of potential post-vaccination ME/CFS cases.
This study does not establish causation between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and the documented symptoms or conditions; the authors explicitly state causal relationships were not determined. The lack of control groups, baseline comparison data, and population denominators prevents assessment of whether these symptoms occurred at rates higher than expected in the general population. Some symptoms may have coincidental onset rather than causal relationship to vaccination.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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