Strokes were reported to be a rare adverse event following the administration of a COVID-19 vaccination, according to a study in Neurology.
Using data provided by the Mexican Ministry of Health, Diego Lopez-Mena, MD, of the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery in Mexico City, and colleagues conducted a nationwide retrospective, descriptive study that analyzed stroke incidence per million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in hospitalized adults from December 2020 to August 2021. Strokes were reported only if they were confirmed within the first 30 days after COVID-19 vaccination.
During the study, 79,399,446 doses of six different COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Sinovac Biotech, CanSino Biologics, Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik V were administered.
A total of 28,646 adverse events occurred within the first 30 days. Of those, 27,968 (98%) were classified as non-serious, and 56 were confirmed as stroke (8.2% of serious adverse events; 55.5% women; median age, 65 years). Overall, stroke incidence was 0.71 cases per 1,000,000 administered doses (95% CI, 0.54-0.92), and the median time from vaccination to stroke was 2 days (interquartile range = 1-5 days).
Further, the most frequent type of stroke was acute ischemic stroke, which occurred in 43 of the 56 patients (75%; incidence rate = 0.54 per 1,000,000; 95% CI, 0.40-0.73); nine strokes were intracerebral hemorrhages (16.1%; IR – 0.11 per 1,000,000; 95% CI, 0.06-0.22). The most common risk factors were hypertension (58.9%) and diabetes mellitus (39.3%).
“Our observations suggest that stroke remains an exceedingly rare event among recipients of six different vaccines against SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers wrote. “Further research is still needed to analyze the potential causal associations between stroke and the different vaccines against SARS-COV-2 vaccines currently available worldwide.”
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