Risk for retinal vascular occlusion low after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination
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Key takeaways:
- The risk for developing retinal vascular occlusion after the mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was low.
- The relative risk was not significantly different from the risk after influenza or Tdap vaccination.
A study using a sample size of more than 3 million individuals found no evidence of an association between the mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and new-encounter diagnoses of retinal vascular occlusion.
The risk for developing this complication was low at 0.003% and comparable to the risk rates related to influenza and Tdap vaccines.
“At the time of widespread COVID vaccinations, there were small, isolated case reports of retina arterial and vascular occlusions, and since case reports do not indicate causality or true evidence, we set out to do this study. The results are compelling to say there is no true association between COVID-19 vaccinations and thromboembolic or occlusive eye events. The public should feel reassured that the relative risk for these complications is low,” Rishi P. Singh, MD, corresponding study author, told Healio/OSN.
This study used the TriNetX database, which aggregates the deidentified data of more than 103 million individuals in 77 health care organizations across nine countries, including 54 U.S. health care organizations. Two groups that received the first dose and second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, respectively, between 2020 and 2022 were compared with two groups that received the influenza vaccine and the Tdap vaccine between 2018 and 2019. The diagnoses of retinal vascular occlusion (RVO) appearing 21 days after each vaccination event were identified. Those with diagnoses of RVO at any time before vaccination were excluded.
Of 3,108,829 people who received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, 104 (0.003%) had a new diagnosis of RVO within 21 days of vaccination. After propensity score matching, the relative risk for new RVO diagnosis after the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination was not significantly different from the relative risk after influenza vaccination (RR = 0.74; 95% CI, 0.54-1.01) or Tdap vaccination (RR = 0.78; 95% CI, 0.44-1.38). The relative risk after the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination was greater compared with the second dose (RR = 2.25; 95% CI, 1.33-3.81).
“The results do not intend to belittle the experience of patients with debilitating vision loss after vaccination but aim to describe how often this phenomenon occurs as a contribution to the safety profile of the first mRNA vaccine widely administered in humans,” the authors wrote. “The results of the post hoc analysis additionally suggest that the risk for a new-encounter RVO diagnosis is greater acutely after COVID-19 infection itself than after the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
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