The footage is disturbing, even disturbing. In a number of videos posted online and viewed millions of times on social media, it appears that two separate American women are experiencing bouts of tremor and involuntary body movements.
There is no direct link between the women, except that both received COVID-19 vaccines shortly before their symptoms appeared, and some linked to the occurrence of these tremors. But scientists say there is another valid explanation for what we see in the footage.
While there is absolute no a suggestion that someone relieves these symptoms, researchers think is not the content of the COVID-19 vaccines that cause the shaking and convulsions.
Instead, it is possible that these viral videos depict a rare and difficult-to-understand medical condition called functional neurological disorder (FND) – a neuropsychiatric disorder that is thought to be caused by a series of stimuli, including physical or emotional events, injuries. , medical procedures and sometimes even the act of having a needle injected.
“Some people with FND have a greater awareness of their body and increased state of arousal and threat, which can hijack normal neural networks that control voluntary movements,” says Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) neurologist David Perez.
“FND teaches us quite a bit about the complexity of the human brain.”
Functional neurological disorders, sometimes also known as conversion disorder, cannot be definitively diagnosed by watching videos, but the forms of body control seen – limb weakness, gait problems, jerky movements, tremors and facial spasms – are all symptoms of FND .
For this reason, the American FND Society issued a press release in January shortly after the videos began to attract attention on social media, noting that the clinical features of FND were consistent with what appeared in the footage.
“We would expect FND to develop in some individuals after vaccination due to a combination of increased stress due to the pandemic, feelings of uncertainty about the vaccination and normal transient physical symptoms, and discomfort after vaccination,” the FND Society wrote.
To give a similar point and to promote the understanding of the FND, Perez and his co-authors wrote a new comment in JAMA Neurology, noting that the videos do look like potential episodes of FND, which – if true – could have been caused by the vaccine injections, but probably not by the vaccines themselves.
“Precipitation factors, although close to the development of the symptoms, are not caused directly by the substances in the vaccine in the same way as for example Neisseria meningitidis is the cause of meningitis, ”the researchers explain.
“Instead, factors such as expectations, beliefs, increased physical attention, excitement, and threat / emotional processing play important mechanistic roles in the pathophysiology of FND.”
The researchers insist that this is currently a very important theme, as videos like these sometimes attract thousands of views and can also be shared by those who advocate conspiracy theories and beliefs against vaccination.
In light of a modern health crisis like COVID-19, it is important to know the word about the strong possibility that these videos actually show rare cases of FND.
“The distribution of these videos may stimulate the hesitation of vaccines by giving too simple an impression of possible links between the vaccine and important neurological symptoms,” says Perez.
“Instead, it’s symptoms of a real brain – based disorder that sits at the intersection of neurology and psychiatry.”
So far, U.S. federal health authorities like the CDC have not had much to say about FND’s potential role in videos like this, emphasizing primarily that side effects of COVID-19 vaccinations tend to be “moderate and moderate and go away quickly. to go “.
This is an important explanation that the public needs to hear, but it does not go far enough to inform people about what FND really is, the researchers say, especially as viral videos of terrifying shaking symptoms gain millions of views – uploaded by people who claim that the vaccines are directly responsible for it.
“A lack of direct messages can be falsely seen by the public that disease control and prevention centers do not check for adverse symptoms, or worse, hide them,” the researchers explain.
“We need to explain the nature of FND transparently and non-judiciously, including that these symptoms are real, but not the direct result of toxic vaccine effects.”
The findings are presented in JAMA Neurology.