VIDEO: ‘We really do need more research’ on link between COVID-19 vaccination and tinnitus
Researchers are exploring a potential link between COVID-19 vaccination and tinnitus.
The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System received more than 12,000 reports of tinnitus after COVID-19 vaccination as of September 2021, according to a recent study in Annals of Medicine and Surgery. Among them is Gregory A. Poland, MD, MACP, FIDSA, FRCP, Mary Lowell Leary Emeritus Professor of Medicine and director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic, who experienced sudden and severe onset of tinnitus within about 90 minutes of receiving his second dose of a messenger RNA vaccine.
In this video, Poland asks Konstantina M. Stankovic, MD, PhD, FACS, Bertarelli Foundation Professor and chair of the department of otolaryngology-head & neck surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Shaowen Bao, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience, physiological sciences and physiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, to discuss their research on the association between tinnitus and SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination, and whether patients who develop tinnitus after vaccination should receive a booster dose.
“We really do need more research in this area,” Poland said. “We need ... federal dollars to go to laboratories like Dr. Stankovic’s and Dr. Bao’s. That’s the only way we’re going to uncover not only the frequency of this, but the mechanism for how it might happen, better diagnostic and objective markers and, of course, therapeutics.”