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A Stanford Medicine research team has confirmed that mRNA-based COVID vaccines can cause inflammation of the heart muscle, known as myocarditis, which can be fatal.

The study, recently published in the journal “Science Translational Medicine,” concludes that these mRNA vaccines can trigger certain immune cells to produce inflammatory proteins, specifically CXCL10 and IFN-gamma, which can cause heart issues.

“It’s not a heart attack in the traditional sense,” Dr. Joseph Wu, a senior author of the study and the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, explained. “There’s no blockage of blood vessels as found in most common heart attacks. When symptoms are mild and the inflammation hasn’t caused structural damage to the heart, we just observe these patients to make sure they recover.”

Some patients, though, can suffer severe complications, including death, Wu said.

The researcher confirmed that COVID itself “can cause myocarditis,” and “to a lesser extent, so can the mRNA vaccines.”

For reasons still unknown, the vaccines are tied to a heightened risk in males under the age of 30, particularly those who receive multiple doses, the study found.

“Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccines after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose,” Stanford Medicine News Center said. “For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccines age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccines.”