Does Guillain-Barré Syndrome Recur After Flu Vaccination?

When a case of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) occurs after receipt of a vaccination, no one is quite sure what to do. The association is temporal, causality is never certain, and yet few doctors or patients want to risk a recurrence of disease by administrating subsequent doses of that vaccine. This issue is particularly germane for yearly influenza vaccination. Researchers used the Kaiser Permanente database to identify individuals aged ≥5 years with GBS diagnoses and then examined patterns of vaccination and recurrence of disease.

Of the 550 people with confirmed GBS, 6 had recurrent GBS during average follow-up of about 7 years. Overall, 279 GBS patients received a total of 989 doses of various vaccines after GBS, including influenza vacci…