Heart problems among teens and young adults who received Covid vaccine is being investigated by the CDC
HEART problems among teenagers and young adults who have received Covid vaccines are being investigated by the Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC said it's received reports that a few, predominantly male adolescents and young adults have developed myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.
The condition often goes away without complications and can be caused by a variety of viruses, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice said.
But it felt that healthcare providers should be made aware of the reports of the "potential adverse event", the committee said.
It said "relatively few" cases had been reported without giving an exact number but recommended further investigation.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said vaccines are known to cause myocarditis.
It would be important to monitor to see if it is causally related to the vaccine as well as the look at the trade-off between risk and benefit, he added.
"Vaccines are going to unequivocally be much more beneficial outweighing this very low, if conclusively established, risk," he said.
Dr. Liam Yore, past president of the Washington State chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said he recently had seen a teenager with myocarditis after vaccination.
But he said he had seen worse outcomes in youngsters with Covid itself, including in a nine-year-old who had arrived at the hospital following a cardiac arrest.
“The relative risk is a lot in favor of getting the vaccine, especially considering how many doses of the vaccine have been administered,”
The CDC said the cases typically occurred within four days after receiving the mRNA vaccines.
While it didn’t specify which vaccines, the United States has given emergency authorization to two mRNA vaccines, from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech .
Most read in News
Israel's Health Ministry in April said it was examining a small number of cases of heart inflammation in people who had received Pfizer's vaccine, though it had not yet drawn any conclusions.
Most of the cases in Israel were reported among people up to age 30.
Pfizer at the time said it had not observed a higher rate of the condition than would normally be the case in the general population and that a causal link to the vaccine had not been established.