Debunking the Myth: Do COVID Vaccines Really Cause Dizziness or Loss of Balance?

2024-03-16 08:30:00

This idea that COVID vaccines might cause dizziness or loss of balance is part of a range of side effects that anti-vaccine activists are agitating these days on social networks, sometimes rightly but often completely wrongly. So let’s see.

Facts

Positional vertigo, or benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) by its full name, is a form of dizziness that occurs following a simple movement of the head and which resolves quickly, usually within a minute. It can still come back periodically for weeks or months and therefore be quite inconvenient, but this is generally quite easy to treat through head positioning exercises.

Like dizziness in general, BPPV can be caused by a number of different factors, such as shock, a virus that infects part of our balance systems, certain illnesses, etc. And it’s not impossible that COVID vaccines can cause dizziness on occasion, although there isn’t much data on that.

Thus, a Taiwanese study published in 2022 in the American Journal of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Medicine and Surgery examined the cases of 50 patients who presented to a neurotology clinic (medical specialty dealing with the inner ear of which the “vestibular system” is a part, which helps maintain balance) for dizziness problems in the days following their anti-COVID vaccination. Overall, they had several different forms of dizziness (including BPPV) and other signs of inner ear problems, leading the authors to conclude that vaccination may have exacerbated pre-existing problems, possibly due to of the immune reaction.

However, they emphasized, this seemed rare and not very serious, so that it did not call into question the risk-benefit calculation of vaccines.

Likewise, another study, German that one, followed more than 4,100 patients from a balance clinic for regarding 15 months, and identified 72 who showed persistent vestibular system problems following their vaccination. After examining each of them, however, the authors concluded that they were mainly “somatoform” problems, therefore without physiological cause, possibly caused by stress related to the pandemic or vaccination.

Dizziness is not noted in all lists of possible side effects of COVID vaccines.

Interestingly, physiotherapy clinician-researcher from Laval University Jean-Sébastien Roy very recently completed a study on loss of balance linked to long COVID. (The article has not yet gone through the peer review stage, so its data should be considered with some caution. Note also that it focused on more general balance problems than just the BPPV .)

Among its 360 participants, a third had had long COVID, another third had had the virus but in its “normal” form, and another third had not been infected. All but 13 were vaccinated. By comparing the results with pre-pandemic data (therefore also pre-vaccine), Mr. Roy did not note more frequent loss of balance in his sample, except in patients with long COVID, probably due to their general weakness.

If Mr. Roy had seen more balance problems than before the pandemic, one might have thought that either the vaccine or the virus was to blame, but his data suggests that neither (except in cases of long COVID) does not have this kind of effect. “That’s what it seems to show,” he told me in an interview, “because most of the patients had had both: both the vaccine and the virus.”

Finally, note that dizziness is not noted in all the lists of possible side effects of anti-COVID vaccines — nor is American public healthis Health Canada, for example, do not mention it. This review of possible neurological effects of vaccination, however, mentions “dizziness”, but classifies them as mild side effects.

Verdict

Not sure. Some findings indicate that COVID vaccines may trigger mild dizziness episodes in some predisposed people, but others suggest it may be a psychological effect. In any case, it appears to be rare and, when it does occur, usually benign.

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