Investigating the association between the COVID-19 vaccination and incident gastrointestinal symptomology: A comprehensive dataset

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic cre-ated a variety of symptoms from mild to acute in the gen-eral population. Additional disease burden was experienced in high-risk populations, such as older adults, people with disabilities or overweight, those from racial and ethnic mi-nority groups, and patients with cancer, chronic kidney, lung or liver disease, or diabetes. Although it is well-known that SARS-CoV-2 mostly affects the respiratory tract, studies have revealed the presence of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in those patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The best protection against infection is through receipt of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is associated with a low incidence of adverse events. However, there is limited research on the lesser-known side effects experienced following receipt of the COVID-19 vacci-nation, amongst healthy and special needs populations. This study investigated the association between the COVID-19 vaccination and, when it occurred, infection, and result-ing gastrointestinal (GI) symptomology, focusing on both the general population and on those previously diagnosed with GI disorders, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflamma-tory Bowel Disease (IBD). Through a short, anonymous sur-vey, 215 participants were assessed for acute onset of GI is-sues and/or worsening of pre-existing GI issues following the receipt of one or more COVID-19 vaccine doses and following contraction of COVID-19 itself, when applicable. All analyses were performed using SAS version 9.4, and prior to study ini-tiation, the study protocol was reviewed and approved as ex-empt by the Stamford Hospital's Institutional Review Board of record.Data analysis included reporting of demographic variables as well as descriptive statistics regarding side effects experi-enced after receipt of the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as after contracting COVID-19, if it occurred. To assess for statistically significant differences between the groups, ANOVA was con-ducted for each survey item. Reporting of results consisted of the mean and standard deviation within each of the groups, and an omnibus p-value less than 0.05 ( p < 0.05) was consid-ered statistically significant. For the purposes of this report, a greater than 0.50 response difference between highest and lowest mean value will be presented. In the event of a statis-tically significant omnibus p-value, the Scheffe test was used as the post-hoc procedure. The database created through this research demonstrates the prevalence of post-COVID-19 vaccination side effects and can serve as preliminary data for gaining a better understanding of how both general and populations with a higher disease burden are being affected by the COVID-19 vaccine, booster doses, and incident COVID-19 infection in vaccinated individ-uals.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)