Health care workers answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Ana G. Cepin, MD on why a COVID vaccine might affect your mammogram.
So, one of the side effects from the vaccine is that you can have swollen lymph nodes on the side where you were vaccinated. The way the vaccine works is that your body’s immune system starts to work to produce antibodies, and that can make it so that the lymph nodes appear swollen and can get enlarged. But it’s not that the vaccine is in any way associated with any cancer.
And so, the recommendation is that if you’ve been vaccinated, that you wait several weeks before getting a mammogram so that there’s no, you know, false positive findings on the mammogram.