Japanese researchers said they found evidence of long-term heart damage in people who received COVID-19 vaccines — including in asymptomatic patients — even though vaccine-induced myocarditis was thought to be rare, transient and limited to subjects experiencing heart symptoms.
Regardless of age or sex, patients who received their second vaccination up to 180 days before imaging showed a 47% higher uptake in heart tissues of fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), an imaging agent, than unvaccinated subjects.
FDG is identical to glucose, a sugar that is the body’s main energy source, but it contains fluorine-18, a radioactive form of fluorine that allows imaging of organs and tissues where FDG accumulates.
Stressed or damaged cells, a hallmark of myocarditis, take up more glucose than healthy cells.
Researchers led by Takehiro Nakahara at Keio University School of Medicine used a retrospective study design to compare positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scans between patients undergoing imaging before COVID-19 vaccines were available (from Nov. 1, 2020, to Feb. 16, 2021) to scans on other subjects after the vaccine rollout (Feb. 17, 2021, to March 31, 2022).
The 1,003 subjects — 700 vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 and 303 unvaccinated — were grouped by age (younger than 40, 41-60 years, and older than 60), sex and time between vaccination and PET/CT…
Children's Health Defense 
