Herpes zoster reactivation — a.k.a. shingles — following COVID-19 vaccination in six patients with comorbid autoimmune/inflammatory diseases may be a new adverse event associated with the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine, suggested a new report.
Signs and symptoms of optic neuritis can be the first indication of multiple sclerosis (MS), or they can occur later in the course of MS. MS is a disease that causes inflammation and damage to nerves in your brain as well as the optic nerve.
Besides MS, optic nerve inflammation can occur with other conditions, including infections or immune diseases, such as lupus. Rarely, another disease called neuromyelitis optica causes inflammation of the optic nerve and spinal cord.
Most people who have a single episode of optic neuritis eventually recover their vision without treatment. Sometimes steroid medications may speed the recovery of vision after optic neuritis.
The exact cause of optic neuritis is unknown. It’s believed to develop when the immune system mistakenly targets the substance covering your optic nerve, resulting in inflammation and damage to the myelin.
Normally, the myelin helps electrical impulses travel quickly from the eye to the brain, where they’re converted into visual information. Optic neuritis disrupts this process, affecting vision.
The following autoimmune conditions often are associated with optic neuritis:
Multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which your autoimmune system attacks the myelin sheath covering nerve fibers in your brain. In people with optic neuritis, the risk of developing multiple sclerosis after one episode of optic neuritis is about 50% over a lifetime.
Your risk of developing multiple sclerosis after optic neuritis increases further if an MRI scan shows lesions on your brain.
Neuromyelitis optica. In this condition, inflammation affects the optic nerve and spinal cord. Neuromyelitis optica has similarities to multiple sclerosis, but neuromyelitis optica doesn’t cause damage to the nerves in the brain as often as multiple sclerosis does. Still, neuromyelitis optica is more severe than MS, often resulting in a diminished recovery after an attack compared with MS.
Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) antibody disorder. This condition can cause inflammation to the optic nerve, spinal cord or brain. Similar to MS and neuromyelitis optica, recurrent attacks of inflammation can occur. Recovery from MOG attacks is usually better than recovery from neuromyelitis optica.
This is a scary side effect...Not sure exactly what the autoimmune inflammatory disease is...but there is quite a list of them:
https://www.washingtonbiotech.com/in_vivo_services/autoimmune_inflammatory_diseases/index.html
Not sure if all the patients in some of thse studies with shingles had had the shingles vaccine either before or after the vax...
All these emerging complications...This is danger of the rush to market.