The EIRA Study: Vaccinations and RA Risk – no Association found!
“Common adult immunizations are not associated with an increased risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis” – that is the result of research published in the October issue of The Annals of the Rheumatic Disease, the EULAR journal. Last week that data were also presented at the American College of Rheumatology ACR Annual Scientific Meeting (took place from 6th to 11th November).
Common adult vaccinations don’t increase the risk of developing RA, recent results of the Swedish EIRA Study Group say.
“Vaccinations are among the events which have long been postulated as inciting agents for rheumatoid arthritis, as well as for many other chronic inflammatory diseases of unknown origin,” lead investigator in the study, Camilla Bengtsson, PhD, stated in her lecture last Monday at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, USA.
No increased RA risk following immunizations
“In our case-control study including incident cases of newly diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, no increased risk of RA following immunization was observed, at least not in the five years prior to disease onset”, the epidemiologist at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, explained in more detail, noting that the study is still ongoing. From Dr. Bengtsson’s point of view these results are indicating that immunological provocation with commonly used vaccines in their present form do not carry a risk of rheumatoid arthritis in adults. (more…)
