Arthritis Ireland Arthritis Ireland

A new study has concluded that routine vaccinations given during adulthood are unlikely to increase the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.

Swedish scientists studied 2,000 people with rheumatoid arthritis, aged 18 to 70, as well as a further 2,000 healthy volunteers.

They looked at participants' recent vaccination histories to see whether those who had received routine injections for flu, tetanus, diphtheria, tick-borne encephalitis, hepatitis A, B and C, polio and pneumococcus were more likely to develop the autoimmune disease.

Among the participants, 31 per cent had been vaccinated during the five-year study period.

Writing in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the researchers revealed that there were no differences in vaccination rates between the two groups of participants.

They also noted that vaccination did not increase the risk of rheumatoid arthritis in participants who smoked - a major risk factor for the disease - or in people with a particular genetic factor associated with the disease, called the HLA-DRB1 shared epitope allele.

The findings indicate that, despite fears that routine vaccinations might cause the body's immune system to turn on itself and trigger long-term inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, that does not appear to be the case.

"It is unlikely that vaccinations in general should be considered a major risk factor for rheumatoid arthritis," the study authors concluded.

"This has practical implications for what advice on vaccinations should be given to the general population and, in particular, to groups at risk of rheumatoid arthritis, such as children of patients with rheumatoid arthritis."

However, the researchers conceded: "This result does not rule out the possibility that vaccinations given earlier in life, or vaccinations that are rare, may trigger the development of rheumatoid arthritis."