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What is the risk of CVT following COVID-19, and how it compares to the risk with vaccines

What is the risk of CVT following COVID-19, and how it compares to the risk with vaccines

This article was published on
April 15, 2021

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We now know that Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) has been reported to occur in about 5 in a million people after first dose of the AZ-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine. But a key question is currently unknown: what is the risk of CVT following a diagnosis of COVID-19? We might expect this to be increased because COVID-19 is associated with other clotting disorders like stroke and brain haemorrhage. New research from the University of Oxford has addressed this question using the TriNetX electronic health records network, recently used to show the neurological and psychiatric consequences of COVID-19 published at the SMC last week. The researchers, led by Professor Paul Harrison and Dr Maxime Taquet from the Department of Psychiatry, counted the number of CVT cases diagnosed in the two weeks after a diagnosis of COVID-19 or after the first dose of vaccine. Please note this data is a preprint, so it is early work that has not yet been through peer-review and is not published in a journal.

We now know that Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) has been reported to occur in about 5 in a million people after first dose of the AZ-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine. But a key question is currently unknown: what is the risk of CVT following a diagnosis of COVID-19? We might expect this to be increased because COVID-19 is associated with other clotting disorders like stroke and brain haemorrhage. New research from the University of Oxford has addressed this question using the TriNetX electronic health records network, recently used to show the neurological and psychiatric consequences of COVID-19 published at the SMC last week. The researchers, led by Professor Paul Harrison and Dr Maxime Taquet from the Department of Psychiatry, counted the number of CVT cases diagnosed in the two weeks after a diagnosis of COVID-19 or after the first dose of vaccine. Please note this data is a preprint, so it is early work that has not yet been through peer-review and is not published in a journal.

Publication

Cerebral venous thrombosis: a retrospective cohort study of 513,284 confirmed COVID-19 cases and a comparison with 489,871 people receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine

Not peer-reviewed
This work has not been scrutinised by independent experts, or the story does not contain research data to review (for example an opinion piece). If you are reporting on research that has yet to go through peer-review (eg. conference abstracts and preprints) be aware that the findings can change during the peer review process
Peer-reviewed
This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

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Prof Paul Harrison, Professor of Psychiatry,University of Oxford

Dr Max Taquet, NIHR Academic ClinicalFellow in Psychiatry, University of Oxford

Prof Masud Husain, Professor of Neurology& Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford

Prof John Geddes, Head of Department ofPsychiatry, University of Oxford, and Director of NIHR Oxford Health BRC

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