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Aims@#Studying the post-vaccination adverse health events is crucial to determine the confidence and acceptance of the public to the newly-developed COVID-19 vaccines. The present study aimed to investigate the prevalence rates of the adverse health events experienced by the recipients of COVID-19 vaccines in Saudi Arabia.@*Methodology and results@#A cross-sectional study was conducted in October 2021 using a google form of an online self-administered questionnaire sent via different social media platforms for recruiting participants from southwestern Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire was prepared by medical and public health professionals and then translated into Arabic, pilot-studied and validated. Among the 453 Saudi adults who participated in the study with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, about (77.9%) were males aged 25.5 ± 10.6 years. Most of the participants were college students living in the Makkah region. Nearly 68.3% reported post-vaccination adverse events, such as injection site pain/swelling (91.9%), fatigue (67.9%), bone and muscle pain (65.2%) and flu-like symptoms (58%). The type of vaccine was significantly associated with the development of adverse events p=0.002 (OR of Pfizer-BioNTech versus AstraZeneca: 0.33, 95% CI: 0.18-0.61). Additionally, ageing of more than the 3rd decade, male gender and being married were significantly associated with lower rates of reporting post-vaccination adverse events. @*Conclusion, significance and impact of study@#The development of COVID-19 vaccine-related adverse health events had no significant associations with residence, education, occupation, BMI, chronic diseases or smoking. However, age, gender, marital state and vaccine type may be considered significant predictors for developing post-vaccination adverse reactions.
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This study was designed to define changes of leucine aminopeptidase [LAP] and total superoxide dismutase [SOD] levels in nasopharyngeal carcinoma [NPC] patients after radiotherapy as a trial to correlate these parameters with disease activity and response to treatment. The study comprised 20 patients with NPC and 20 control subjects of those attending blood bank for blood donation. All patients underwent detailed history taking, full ENT clinical examination, and general examination for draining lymph nodes. Lesions characters and TNM staging were determined. All study participants gave blood samples for estimation of total blood SOD and serum LAP [pre-treatment] and were re-estimated 2 and 4 months after radiotherapy. There was a significant [P<0.05] increase in patients age and number of males [18:2] with significant increased incidence in smokers [16:4]. Eleven patients had stage I, 4 patients had stage II and 5 had stage III lesions. All patients with stage II and III lesions and 7 with stage I were smokers. Pre-treatment levels of LAP showed a significant [P<0.05] increase compared both to control, 2-m and 4-m levels with progressive steady decease with treatment. The levels detected 4-m after treatment showed a non-significant difference compared to control levels. The pretreatment SOD levels showed a significant [P<0.05] increase compared to both control and 4-m levels. Also, the SOD levels detected 2-m after treatment showed a significant [P<0.05] increase compared both to control and 4-m levels. There was a positive significant correlation between pretreatment levels of LAP, [r=0.85 1, P<0.001] and SOD, [r=0.643, P=0.002] and progress of tumor growth manifested as stage. We can conclude that pretreatment determination of total SOD and serum LAP correlate with severity and aggressiveness of NPC and could be used as an aid for staging. Furthermore, serum LAP correlates with response of NPC to radiotherapy and could be used to follow-up patients and as a prognostic marker