"Introduction
... All types of [COVID-19] vaccines have been associated with a risk of neurological complications ranging from mild to severe. These include thrombotic thrombocytopenia, aseptic meningitis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, status epilepticus, and different cranial neuropathies. Cervical dystonia occurring after a COVID-19 vaccine was not previously reported in the literature. In this article, we describe a case of acute cervical dystonia occurring after the first dose of the BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine.
Case report
A 38-year-old male visited the neurology clinic for stiffness, twist, and pain in the neck that had persisted for three months. He felt spasms and twisting of the neck 24 h after receiving the first dose of the BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine...
Discussion
Cervical dystonia is a focal dystonia that manifests with a varying degree of twisting neck posturing, neck pain, and neck tremor. It is a hyperkinetic movement that is often under-recognized and misdiagnosed with a significant disability if untreated. The cause of cervical dystonia can be either idiopathic, acquired, or hereditary... The occurrence of cervical dystonia following the COVID-19 vaccination has not been previously reported in the literature. In our case, the temporal relationship between taking the vaccine and the development of cervical dystonia, the negative family history, lack of exposure to drugs and toxins, and the normal investigations including neuroimaging may suggest a causal relationship of the vaccination."
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.