TRIP

Nerve disorder does not recur after later vaccines: study

Reuters Health News, 2012

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite concerns by some that vaccines might cause a crippling nerve disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome, a new study finds that people who receive vaccines after previously having been diagnosed with the condition do not experience any flare-ups.
Roger Baxter, the lead author of the study and the co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center.
The cause is unknown, but Baxter said there's evidence that a number of cases were related to a shot against the swine flu outbreak that occurred during the 1970s.
"A relationship to a flu vaccine is possible," Baxter said, though he added that studies on Guillain-Barré and other vaccines have not found a link.
"We don't really think that other than the 1976 swine flu vaccine that there's any connection between the two," he told Reuters Health.
In fact, recent studies have found that the flu itself might be tied to the syndrome (see Reuters Health reports of June 24, 2011 and January 28, 2009).
CDC URGES CAUTION The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) caution against giving a flu shot to anyone with Guillain-Barré whose disease surfaced within six weeks of a previous immunization against the flu.
The recommendation is relevant to only a very small subset of people with Guillain-Barré, but Baxter's concern is that some physicians expand it to include anyone with a history of the syndrome.
As part of a large study looking for any connection between Guillain-Barré and vaccines, Baxter and his colleagues collected medical records from 550 people with the syndrome.
All the patients had been treated at Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, and the researchers searched for any immunizations and Guillain-Barré recurrences over more than a decade.
Among this group, 279 had received at least one vaccine subsequent to their diagnosis, including 107 people who got a flu shot.