Getting the COVID Vaccine? Here’s What You Should Know About Cancer Imaging

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Nurse leader Jeanine Gordon gives nurse Emma Devlin the COVID-19 vaccination.

Nurse leader Jeanine Gordon gives nurse Emma Devlin the COVID-19 vaccination. Photo: Richard DeWitt.

A small but significant number of people experience swollen lymph nodes as a side effect of receiving a COVID vaccine. This can look like a clinically significant finding on cancer imaging, including chest CTs, PET scans, mammography, and breast MRI. In response, radiologists from MSK and three other institutions recently published recommendations for cancer imaging and COVID vaccination.

As reported by Reuters and the Associated Press, the authors recommend scheduling routine cancer imaging screenings either before vaccination or six weeks after. But patients should not delay getting either the vaccine or clinically urgent imaging. Cancer patients should receive the vaccine in the arm opposite the active or suspected cancer. Medical staff should ask patients receiving imaging about their vaccine history, including the date of vaccination and the side of the body vaccinated. If enlarged lymph nodes appear on imaging, radiologists may request follow up images or, in a small number of cases, biopsy.  

Want to learn more about MSK’s COVID-related research? Visit Synapse, the Library’s database of MSK-authored publications, for a full list of COVID-related works.

 Want to know more about COVID vaccination? Visit MSK’s info page.

New MSK LibGuide on COVID-19

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Over the last year, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt by everyone in all walks of life, across the planet. It is not surprising, therefore, that the amount of COVID-19 related information available, both scholarly and not, has continued to grow exponentially.

With over 5,000 trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, over 120,000 openly-available journals article in PubMed Central (PMC), over 110,000 records in PubMed, over 2,000 COVID-19 related systematic reviews or meta-analyses, and even 296 publications by MSK authors (as of 3/11/2021), efforts to organize this information and make it more discoverable couldn’t be more welcome.

Thanks to the savvy information evaluation and organization skills of MSK Library Research Informationist, Kendra Godwin, the MSK community and the public at large can now take advantage of the Library’s new COVID-19 LibGuide to discover the plethora of COVID-19 resources and tools available online.

The MSK Library COVID-19 LibGuide includes resources arranged across nine tabs/sections:

  • Home
  • Local Resources
  • Resource Collections, News, and Trackers
  • Literature
  • Mental Health and Workplace Safety
  • Equity, Ethics, and Communication
  • Guiding Clinical and Cancer Care
  • Research, Data, and Visualizations 
  • Information for Cancer Patients and Caretakers

Included resources come from sources ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to scholarly publishers, professional organizations, public and private institutions, etc., that are both national and international. This finding aid will hopefully help fulfill a variety of information needs, both work-related and personal.

For more information about the COVID-19 LibGuide, please feel free to Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Finding the Right Database

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Explore the MSK Library’s redesigned A-Z Databases list!

Last year our old alphabetical database list got a makeover and now it’s easy to search and browse for the perfect database for your specific needs.

Our databases can always be browsed alphabetically, but now they can also be browsed by subject area and found by keyword search!

 

 

Once you identify the database you want to search, the link will take you directly to that database – remember, if you are working remotely be sure to log into Remote Access first – or you can “share” the database by selecting the icon, which allows you to copy the permalink to the database as well as send the URL to yours or someone else’s email.

The Database page is linked to the Help page but you can always contact the Library with questions about this page as well as for assistance with database selection and searching.