COVID Vaccines Do Not Trigger Sudden Hearing Loss: Study – Medscape
Anecdotal reports have linked the vaccines against COVID-19 to the sudden loss of hearing in some people. But a new study has found no evidence for such a connection with any of the three approved shots.
The analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) found that the incidence of sudden onset hearing loss was not elevated — and might even be a bit lower than expected — in the first few weeks a…….
Anecdotal reports have linked the vaccines against COVID-19 to the sudden loss of hearing in some people. But a new study has found no evidence for such a connection with any of the three approved shots.
The analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) found that the incidence of sudden onset hearing loss was not elevated — and might even be a bit lower than expected — in the first few weeks after receiving the injections.
“We’re not finding a signal,” said Eric J. Formeister, MD, MS, a neurotology fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, and the first author of the US study, which appeared February 24 in JAMA Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.
Formeister and his colleagues undertook the study in response to reports of hearing problems, including hearing loss and tinnitus, that occurred soon after COVID-19 vaccination.
They analyzed reports of sudden hearing loss, experienced within 21 days of vaccination, logged in VAERS. Anyone can report a potential event to the database, which does not require medical documentation in support of the adverse event. To minimize potential misdiagnoses, Formeister and his colleagues reviewed only those reports that indicated that a doctor had diagnosed sudden hearing loss, leaving 555 cases (305 in women; mean age 54 years) between December 2020 and July 2021.
Dividing these reports by the total doses of vaccines administered in the United States during that period yielded an incidence rate of 0.6 cases of sudden hearing loss for every 100,000 people, Formeister and his colleagues reported.
When the researchers divided all cases of hearing loss in the VAERS database (2170) by the number of people who had received two doses of vaccine, the incidence rate increased to 28 per 100,000 people. For comparison, the authors report, the incidence of sudden hearing loss within the United States population is between 11 and 77 per 100,000 people, depending on age.
“There was not an increase in cases of sudden [sensorineural] hearing loss associated with COVID-19 vaccination compared to previously published reports before the COVID-19 vaccination era,” study coauthor Elliott D. Kozin, MD, an assistant professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, told Medscape.
Another reassuring sign: If hearing loss were linked to the vaccines, the researchers said, they would expect to see an increase in the number of complaints in lockstep with an increase in the number of doses administered. However, the opposite was true. “[T]he rate of reports per 100,000 doses decreased across the vaccination period, despite large concomitant increases in the absolute number of vaccine doses administered per week,” the researchers reported.
The researchers also looked at case reports of 21 men and women who had experienced sudden hearing loss after having received COVID-19 vaccines, to see …….
