"Introduction
The term vasculitis encompasses a wide and heterogeneous group of disorders with shared histopathological findings. It is a pathological process characterized by an inflammatory process affecting the vessel wall, both arterial and venous, of different sizes and of any body area (1). Inside the vessel wall, there is an infiltrate, which can create discontinuity of the wall itself with red blood cells leaking...
CV [cutaneous vasculitis] is mainly a small-vessel vasculitis affecting dermal and/or hypodermal capillaries and venules, which usually show histopathologic findings consistent with leukocytoclastic vasculitis, characterized by fibrinoid necrosis of vessel wall, erythrocyte extravasation, and neutrophilic infiltrate with degeneration known as leukocytoclasis with nuclear dust (karyorrhexis)...
[S]ince the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the introduction and administration of COVID-19 vaccines on a global scale, cases of COVID-19-associated and vaccine-associated CV have been reported...
In this review, we analyze and compare the current and most recent literature on clinical and immunohistopathologic features of CV induced by systemic SARS-CoV-2 infection and CV secondary to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, focusing on the possible underlying pathogenetic mechanisms...
SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and cutaneous vasculitis
In the mini-series presented, only patients with histological confirmation of leukocytoclastic vasculitis were included. Totally, 39 patients developed CV after the COVID-19 vaccine...
Discussion
... Almost all the available COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with CV, e.g., mRNA vaccines (Pfizer BioNTech), mRNA-1273 (Moderna), adenoviral vector-based vaccines (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19; Oxford-AstraZeneca), and inactivated vaccines (Covaxin, Sinovac)."
© 2022 Corrà, Verdelli, Mariotti, Ruffo di Calabria, Quintarelli, Aimo, Sunderkötter and Caproni. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.