LONDON: Covid-19 is more likely to cause very rare neurological diseases than vaccination with the preventive agents AstraZeneca or Pfizer, according to a study by the University of Oxford in Great Britain.

Covid more likely to cause neurological complications than vaccination

There have been reports of rare neurological complications related to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNtech Covid-19 vaccines.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed the anonymized medical records of more than 32 million people across England.

Researchers assessed the risk of developing neurological complications within 28 days of an initial dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, known in India as Covishield, or Pfizer, or within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.

They found an increased but reduced risk of the rare neurological diseases Guillain-Barré syndrome and Bell’s palsy after the first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine, and an increased but reduced risk of hemorrhagic stroke after the first dose of Pfizer vaccine.

However, according to the researchers, infection with Covid-19 was associated with a higher risk of developing neurological complications than taking any vaccine.

One of the researchers involved in the study, Professor Carol Coupland from the University of Nottingham in the UK, said: “This analysis provides important information about which neurological diseases may be linked to Covid-19 vaccination or infection.”

Overall, the results of this study suggest that the risk of hospitalization with nervous system complications associated with covid-19 infection outweighs the risks associated with covid-19 vaccination, Coupland said.

The researchers found different risks for different types of neurological disease depending on which people were vaccinated.

However, these were far less than the risks associated with a positive COVID-19 PCR test.

For example, we estimate that there are 145 additional cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome per 10 million people in the 28 days following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, compared with 38 per 10 million for those receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. In, Martina said. University of Oxford and co-lead author on the study.

Researchers found that early clinical trials of vaccines were not sufficient to detect very rare neurological adverse events — those that affect less than 1 in 10,000 people.

The latest study did this by looking at real world data from more than 32 million health records in England, he said.

The study used a so-called “self-controlled case series (SCCS)” design.

A SCSS compares how often adverse events – in this case neurological complications – occur in different set time windows.

The authors noted several limitations of the study, which only examined the risks associated with the first dose of the vaccine.

At the time of this study data on post-second dose outcomes were limited as the UK immunization program is still ongoing.

Researchers were also unable to switch between types because of the way medical records were encoded. guillain-barre syndrome to differentiate.