Minimal change disease and COVID-19 vaccination: Four cases and review of literature

Preeti Chandra; Marisa Roldao; Cinthia Drachenberg; Paulo Santos; Naoki Washida; Alexander Clark; Bipin Bista; Ryunosuke Mitsuna; Angelito Yango

doi:10.5414/CNCS110924

Minimal change disease and COVID-19 vaccination: Four cases and review of literature

Clin Nephrol Case Stud. 2022 Jul 21:10:54-63. doi: 10.5414/CNCS110924. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Preeti Chandra¹, Marisa Roldao², Cinthia Drachenberg³, Paulo Santos², Naoki Washida⁴, Alexander Clark⁵, Bipin Bista⁵, Ryunosuke Mitsuna⁴, Angelito Yango⁵

Affiliations

¹ Division of Nephrology, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA.
² Department of Nephrology, Centro Hospitalar do Médio Tejo, Torres Novas, Portugal.
³ Division of Pathology, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA.
⁴ Department of Nephrology, International University of Health and Welfare, Narita Hospital Narita, Japan, and.
⁵ Baylor Scott and White All Saints Medical Center, Fort Worth, TX, USA.

Abstract

There have been multiple reports of the development of de novo or relapse of glomerular diseases after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. While most of them have occurred with the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna/NIAID), there also have been reports associated with the vector vaccines (AstraZeneca/ChAdOx1-S) vaccine and the inactivated vaccines. Minimal change disease (MCD) is one of the more common glomerular diseases noted to have been associated with the COVID-19 vaccination. We report here 4 more cases of MCD occurring in association with the COVID-19 vaccine, 3 were de novo cases, and 1 case had a relapse of MCD. We also review all the 41 cases described thus far in the literature and review potential common pathways activated by the vaccination that play a role in the pathogenesis of MCD.

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccine; glomerular disease; graft versus host disease; minimal change disease; nephrotic syndrome.

Publication types

Case Reports