Post-vaccination syncope is something no one wants to see happen to a patient receiving immunizations in your office. So is there anything we can do to prevent these rare but unfortunate episodes from occurring? Kemper et al. (10.1542/peds.2017-0508) decided to take on that challenge and turned to drinking water pre-vaccination, quite a bit of drinking water, as a way to increase peripheral vascular tone, and decrease the changes of post-vaccine syncope. The authors had more than 900 adolescents receiving their vaccines in primary care clinics drink up to 500 ml of water and then received their vaccination 10-60 minutes later while more than 900 controls got their usual care without extra drinking water. Those who got the water intervention and the controls got a survey post-vaccination regarding presyncopal symptoms they may have experienced even if they did not faint.
While presyncopal symptoms did occur in the intervention and control groups, there were not significant differences in the frequency of those symptoms occurring whether or not the teen had drunk the water. In both groups there were some risk factors identified that were associated with presyncopal symptoms so rather than water down the findings of this study by revealing them in this blog, check out this study which is fine for the faint of heart and learn what characteristics of your teen population might predispose them to being pre-syncopal, even if drinking water is not the solution.
