Evaluation of changes in blood cell count before and after injection of Covid-19 vaccine in cancer patients

Abstract

On the 30th of January 2020, the World Health Organization declared a severe respiratory disorder that arose from the city of Wuhan, China, as an emergency issue in global health, and on February 11, it called it Covid-19, and on March 11, 2020, it was declared as a pandemic. A disease that caused health, social and economic problems among the countries of the world. Considering that there is currently no effective treatment available for the disease, the vaccine is one of the best health weapons in public health. According to the reports done in normal people, thrombocytopenia and thrombosis have been seen in different places within a few weeks after vaccine injection, which is in the form of vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia (VITT). Materials and methods: In this study, 128 cancer patients who were under treatment and were the population studied in this research, were included in the study and anticoagulated blood was taken from the patients and it wad poured into tubes containing anticoagulant. In these patients, a complete blood count test (Complete Blood Count with Differential) was performed before the first round of covid-19 vaccination, one and three weeks after that. Then, the changes of platelets, hemoglobin and white blood cells at the determined times were investigated with appropriate statistical tests.

Results: Compared to the control group, our results did not show a significantly increased or decreased frequency of platelet cells as well as hemoglobin and types of leukocytes in cancer patients who received the vaccine compared to before vaccination. These changes in the first week after vaccination were not significant compared to the third week. White blood cells (leukocytes) did not increase significantly in cancer patients who received the vaccine compared to before vaccination. However, based on the type of cancer, we observed that platelet changes in colon cancer patients significantly increased after the vaccine injection.