Can PMR (Polymyalgia Rheumatica) be induced by vaccine?

Thank you fir sharing your experience.

…for….

I had 3 Pfizer vax and my 4th booster was Moderna. I had muscle soreness after all shots but the 4th booster sent me to the doctor with stiffness, pain in pelvis, hips, knees etc. He diagnosed PMR. I am down to 5 mg and doing fairly well. I know from this forum (thank you everyone!!!) that getting down to zero will be very tough.
I will never take another mRNA vaccination. I am hoping that if I get Covid, the current treatments will get me through it. I am balancing the risks of Covid versus mRNA vax - I am choosing no more vax.
I would love to see data on the number of cases of PMR by age group since mRNA vaccinations started especially in the trial participants.
Ginger

73 yo male, relatively healthy. Recently I took 4th Covid injection. Soon (3-4 wks) debilitating shoulder & hip pain started. could not sit, lay sit on the throne. for awhile some dark thoughts appeared, is this how i have to live for the rest? Doc identified PMR, started on 20mg prednisone. after 2-3 wks, pain subsided, down to 15mg, then to 10mg. Pain cones back intermittently, esp in the morning. Doc added 12.5 mg MTX once a week, still waiting for positive effects. Once a month blood test for liver changes. will continue until some improvement. No More Covid or other injections, let the system itself fight infections, did that all throughout my life. Don't believe the gov't witch doctors!

I agree that Covid vaccinations can trigger PMR, but are you sure that is what you have? I think that most people experience immediate relief when put on Prednisone, unless your dose was too low to begin with. Just guessing . I have a very mild case that only hurts in bed and now it is confined to my upper shoulders. Currently taking 2 mg. Good luck!

Age 72 .I too was healthy walking 3-4 km daily (nordic walking). A week after the 1st Covid vaccine Booster i developed weakness of my joints and ligaments , couldn’t stand , roll over in the bed, attend to personal hygiene . My family Doctor didn’t have an answer for the shocking suddenness of the attack on my body . I suggested to her I had PMR caused by the vaccine (having done searches on medical Web Sites.) Prednisolone 20 mg was prescribed over a year ago , now on 5 mg daily , about to taper again in a weeks time for the 3rd time. I saw a Rheumatologist early on he diagnosed PMR vaccine related. Having excluded Arthritis and other causes he prescribed Methotrexate once a week for 4 weeks combined with the Prednisolone. I do Qigong exercises daily for 15 minutes x2 daily and find them extremely helpful especially for my neck shoulders and arms and balance (.Master Change Lee (Spring Forest Qigong) youtube is probably the best and most authentic teacher of Qigong on youtube. The exercises can be done by anybody and very effective. I’ve just started taking Flexofytol Forte capsules (a mixture of Curcumine , Boswellia Serrata and Vit.D) produced by TILMAN - Pharma a herbal- based Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Belgium. It has been tested on about 1000 patients by their family Doctors in Belgium with good success for (Arthritis - Symptoms. But one must consult one’s doctor first . I’m hoping to avoid another relapse as the side effects of the strong medications like Prednisolone Methotrexate etc are somewhat concerning. However,! it’s important to have good quality of life .and be reasonably pain free and never give up. The vaccine save billions of lives but why some of us react so badly we may never know. I certainly did not have the 2nd or 3rd boosters and nobody could persuade me to.

Thank you for posting your account of your personal history and your suggestion of Qi Gong. (I find every story of a PMR journey helps me with mine.) I just wanted to add something I saw on a different blog (stuffthatworks.com). A doctor on that site who has PMR (Ed582) set out his explanation of the vaccine connection. I will try to paraphrase (I am not medically trained). He said the vaccine can trigger (not cause) an over-reaction of one's immune system -- thus, an autoimmune response. "PMR represents a hyper-active but confused immune system that is vigorously attacking antigens of your own tendons instead of pathogens." The muscles themselves are not affected, so exercise is fine if it does not cause pain. He also suggests continuing to take vaccines if you are at risk. Since the onset of my PMR following a Covid booster in late April 2022, I have had two Shingles vaccine shots and one additional Covid booster, following the advice of my rheumatologist, without side effects. I recommend Ed's blog posts for additional information on how PMR (and prednisone) works.

At the age of 68, I was in excellent physical condition. I had none of the underlying conditions published by the CDC in the summer of 2020 that were causing the majority of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid. My philosophy at the time was, “if it comes from a pharmaceutical company, I don’t want it in my body.” Largely because of the early misinformation about the mRNA vaccine preventing both infection and transmission, I was guilted into taking it.
I received the second dose of the Pfizer shot on March 26, 2021. About a month later, I noticed a pain in the joint at the base of my left big toe. When the pain continued to worsen, I went to my family doctor who made the diagnosis of gout. I have never had gout before, and my uric acid level was normal. After initial treatments with prednisone and colchicine, the symptoms only worsened. By July, my entire left foot was extremely swollen. Additional attempts by my doctor with different combinations of the same drugs only lessened the symptoms slightly. Considering that a typical gout attack only lasts about a week, this was obviously a reaction to the shot. I had also found some research that explained the mechanism behind how the mRNA vaccine can trigger inflammation: https://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(22)00103-4
In September, my doctor sent me to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist very matter-of-factly stated that their practice saw may patients with gout and arthritis reactions to the mRNA vaccine that they provided the typical treatments for. I had also found hundreds of entries of gout and arthritis reactions in the CDC’s VAERS database. (The rheumatologist’s estimate was that less than 10% of adverse events are actually reported to that database.) He put me on 30 days of colchicine. By the end of that 30 days, the symptoms were almost gone. After a few more weeks, I could say that I finally had no more symptoms. But I really had no way of knowing whether that last lengthy round of colchicine was what got rid of my symptoms, or if it just went away on its own after almost 5 months. There was never any fluid drawn from my left big toe joint to determine the presence of urate crystals.
Fast forward to late March of 2023, when I started noticing some pain in my left wrist. As it started getting worse, my doctor referred me to a wrist/hand specialist. After taking x-rays, his diagnosis was tendonitis and put me on a 6-day methylprednisolone pack. After the first day (6 pills), the pain decreased noticeably, but increased again over the next 5 days. After about another week, I was back at the rheumatologist who thought it was either gout or pseudogout and prescribed colchicine again, which I took from May 14 to June 5. Beginning in early/mid-May, symptoms typical of different types of arthritis started showing up in other areas. My right wrist and hand began hurting as much as my left. I felt neck pain if I moved my head to far either up and down or left and right. My shoulders started hurting. If I take a deep breath, my I feel some pain in my rib cage. Finally, both feet have been very swollen for several weeks. It is now June 18, and all those symptoms are still present. I’m alternately taking ibuprofen and acetaminophen now to help reduce the pain. Same as two years ago, there was nothing in my blood work or anything else that would normally be connected with these different types of arthritis (PMR?).
I have found more research that starts to call into question the claim that the mRNA vaccine cannot alter a person’s DNA. I also found an article that investigated the effect of vaccines on people with two genetic variants of the Methylenetetrahydrofolate-Reductase (MTHFR) gene, C677T and A1298C. Having done 23&Me, I discovered that I have both of those variants. Unfortunately, there does not seem to have been any studies looking specifically at a link between those variants and the mRNA vaccine. Hopefully, we will see more research performed on both of these topics that might help to explain not only the reaction I had in 2021, but a return of similar, but more extensive, arthritis-type symptoms nearly two years later.
I will provide an update at some point as my symptoms progress. Having spent most of my adult life learning about and practicing many things good for my health, I have been mostly mad at myself for giving in to the pressure of taking the shot, but of course I’m also furious about the misinformation from Fauci and others. My only hope now is that this isn’t something more permanent.

YES!!!! I as well got pmr and then unfortunately it morphed into gca 4 months later. I am mad at myself for taking it too. I thought i was doing the right thing and now this had ruined my life. I will never take another covid vaccine again. The first 3 shots i got a yeast infection about 2 weeks after. I have never had a yeast infection in my life. The 4th booster got a yeast infection again and then a week after that i was really stiff and felt lousy. Pmr was diagnosed may of 2021. Sept i got gca. These are not coincidence, the booster did this. I hope more people hear our stories so they have more info to make a decision on whether to get a booster or not.

I have always thought that mine was tied to a botched flu shot injection in October, 2018, but the onset was not immediate. It’s just that I had to work through a frozen shoulder for months and months and then the rest of my body fell apart. Who knows? The disease is so mysterious. But they do say it can be a result of an injury. I had no issues with any of the COVID shots, barely a sore arm.