Vaccines Are Causing Enlarged Lymph Nodes

Here's news you can use, at least if you are having medical imaging done. It seems that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are causing lymph nodes to swell, and this is causing false positives in mammograms and other cancer screenings.

CNN tells the story of a primary care physician who got her first Moderna shot about a week before a scheduled mammogram. The story includes an image of the mammogram, and even I, knowing nothing whatsoever about radiology, can tell something is not normal.

According to NYT, this is a known side-effect, with up to 16% of Moderna patients and about 0.3% of Pfizer patients reporting it. The lumps tend to occur only on the side where you get the injection. So don't freak out if you find lumpy lymph nodes on that side after you've been inoculated.   

The same article quotes the chief of Breast Imaging at Mass General Hospital as saying you only need to worry if the swelling persists six weeks after your inoculation.  Also your radiologist should know if you've received a shot inside that time period.

Apparently the situation gets complicated for cancer patients, and there is an extensive discussion of that in the NYT piece.

"Enlarged lymph node" by Thirteen Of Clubs is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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