AccScience Publishing / MI / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/MI025120023
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Potential vagus nerve-related adverse events in rotavirus vaccination

Darrell O. Ricke1*
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1 Department of Research, Molecular BioInsights, Winchester, Massachusetts, United States of America
Received: 20 March 2025 | Revised: 21 June 2025 | Accepted: 9 July 2025 | Published online: 29 July 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Immune Regulation by the Vagus Nerve)
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Vagus nerve-related adverse events (AEs) can be triggered by gastrointestinal infections. This raises the question of whether AE data from live-attenuated virus vaccination can be leveraged to investigate potential vagus nerve involvement. In this study, data from the Vaccine AEs Reporting System were retrospectively analyzed for candidate vagus nerve-related AEs in infants aged 0 and 1. Live-attenuated rotavirus vaccinations were associated with elevated normalized frequencies across all 16 selected vagus nerve-related AEs in both age groups, with the majority showing higher normalized frequencies in infants aged 0 than in those aged 1. These findings suggest that oral, live-attenuated virus vaccination may provide valuable insights into vagus nerve-related AEs. Furthermore, the higher normalized frequencies of AEs observed in infants aged 0 could indicate that the administered dose or minimum infectious units may be excessive for a subset of younger infants.

Keywords
Vagus nerve
Rotavirus
Vomiting
Emesis
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
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Microbes & Immunity, Electronic ISSN: 3029-2883 Print ISSN: 3041-0886, Published by AccScience Publishing