Akash Singh, Banaras Hindu University
COVID-19 vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) were recently approved to be used in an emergency. The World Health Organization (WHO) made a statement to increase awareness regarding breastfeeding after getting vaccinated and advised not to cessate breastfeeding following vaccine administration. Still, many mothers have discontinued breastfeeding due to concern that maternal vaccination may alter human milk. To address this knowledge gap as no direct data was available, a study was done to promote vaccine safety for pregnant and lactating women. They analyzed and detected if any vaccine-related mRNA was detectable in human milk after vaccination.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, is the first to show vaccine safety while breastfeeding using direct data. The cohort study took place between December 2020 and February 2021. The mean age of the mothers was 37.8 and the child’s age ranged from 1 month to 3 years. “In no of the milk samples tested we detected mRNA-related vaccine,” said UCSF lead author Yarden Golan, Ph.D. “This finding provides experimental proofs of the safety of mRNA-based lactation vaccines.”
Assessment of mRNA from COVID-19 Vaccines in Human Milk:
Written informed consent was obtained from all study volunteers before the study was done. Self-collected milk samples were kept on ice or frozen right away (at home) until they arrived at the lab. Before immunization, samples were taken, as well as at various times up to 48 hours after vaccination. The RNeasy Mini Kit (Qiagen) was used to recover total RNA from milk components, followed by a real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis targeting the mRNA used in the COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines.
A total of seven breastfeeding women (with an average age of 37.8 years) agreed to participate in this study. Their children were between the ages of one month and three years. Vaccine-associated mRNA was not found in 13 milk samples obtained from 7 breastfeeding women 4 to 48 hours after vaccination. These findings add to the growing body of data showing vaccination-related mRNA does not pass to the newborn and that lactating women who receive the COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccine should not discontinue breastfeeding. Furthermore, any leftover mRNA below our assay’s detection limits would be degraded by the newborn’s gastrointestinal tract, lowering infant exposure even more.
Prospects:
The findings are encouraging, but the study was hampered by a small sample size and a small number of participants who received the mRNA vaccine. Furthermore, mRNA stability may be affected by milk storage conditions. The study provided the first direct evidence of vaccine safety for pregnant and lactating women, and it could serve as the foundation for future cohort or analytical studies with larger sample sizes and more precise data. “The findings back up current advice that mRNA vaccinations are safe during lactation and those nursing women who get the COVID immunization should continue to breastfeed,” stated corresponding author Stephanie L. Gaw. “However, to adequately quantify the effect of these vaccines on lactation, clinical evidence from bigger populations is required,” she added.
Also read: Understanding complexes within the SARS-CoV-2 proteome
Reference:
Golan, Y., Prahl, M., Cassidy, A., Lin, C. Y., Ahituv, N., Flaherman, V. J., & Gaw, S. L. (2021). Evaluation of Messenger RNA From COVID-19 BTN162b2 and mRNA-1273 Vaccines in Human Milk. JAMA pediatrics, e211929. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.1929
- The Corrosion Prediction from the Corrosion Product Performance
- Nitrogen Resilience in Waterlogged Soybean plants
- Cell Senescence in Type II Diabetes: Therapeutic Potential
- Transgene-Free Canker-Resistant Citrus sinensis with Cas12/RNP
- AI Literacy in Early Childhood Education: Challenges and Opportunities
Author info:
Akash Singh is a first-year master’s student of Biochemistry at Banaras Hindu University. He plans to pursue Ph.D. in the future. He aims to research and teach the young minds of the country.
Social media links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akash-singh-82b5811a2/
Publications :
Digital photos stored as DNA-Is it possible?
Saptaparna Pal, Amity University Kolkata Currently, in our world, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and each day human produces photos, emails, tweets, and other digital files that add on to another 2-4 million gigabytes of data. A massive amount of this data was stored in enormous facilities called exabyte data centers. […]