Investigating the Impact of Vaccination on Long COVID Symptoms

Vaccination status does not impact the severity of neurological symptoms of long COVID, according to a Northwestern Medicine-led study published in Brain Communications.

While it’s been established that being vaccinated against COVID-19 can help prevent severe infection, less is known about how vaccination impacts the neurological symptoms in those patients that develop long COVID, a chronic condition which often includes brain fog, headaches and numbness or tingling in the extremities.

To better understand how vaccination impacts long COVID symptoms, investigators in the laboratory of Igor Koralnik, MD, the Archibald Church Professor of Neurology and chief of Neuro-infectious Disease and Global Neurology in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology, who was senior author of the study, examined patient data from the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive COVID-19 Center.

“This study emerged from growing recognition of long COVID as a very multifaceted condition,” said Tracey Singer, a third-year Feinberg medical student and a co-author of the study. “We wanted to expand on prior findings that found differences in neurological symptoms and cognitive dysfunction between individuals who had been hospitalized for severe COVID and those with milder cases who didn’t have to be hospitalized.”

In the study, Singer and fellow third-year Feinberg medical students Shreya Mukherjee and Aditi Venkatesh analyzed data from more than 1,000 electronic health records and compared hospitalization rates, symptom severity and the timing of COVID-19 vaccinations.

They found no significant differences in long COVID symptom severity between patients vaccinated before or after an infection, according to the findings.

“While research has shown that vaccination can prevent the development of long COVID, our research shows that regardless of vaccination status, there is no significant difference in the neurological manifestations of long COVID once you’ve already developed it,” Mukherjee said.

The findings highlight the need for further research into long COVID, as well as the need for treatments for patients experiencing the chronic condition.

“This really indicates that the patients coming in are a unique entity and they should be treated as such,” Venkatesh said.

Although the study showed that vaccination against COVID-19 doesn’t appear to impact the severity of long COVID symptoms, being vaccinated against COVID-19 is still the best way to prevent long COVID from developing in the first place, Mukherjee said.

“People should still get vaccinated for COVID. Research has shown that vaccination can prevent the development of long COVID, so people should get vaccinated to keep themselves and their community safe,” Mukherjee said.

The study was funded by National Institute on Aging grant K23AG078705, with additional support from National Institute on Aging grant R21AG086751 and a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Michael Ferro.