Original author | Saima May Sidik
There is a long-term, significant increase in the risk of cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack and stroke, after Covid-19 infection, a large study shows.
A new study[1] shows that even mild exposure to COVID-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular disease for at least one year after diagnosis. The research team found that many conditions (such as heart failure and stroke) were significantly more common in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in controls who had never been infected.
The risk of 20 diseases of the heart and blood vessels remains high for at least one year after a COVID-19 diagnosis. Source: Living Art Enterprises/Science Photo Library
Not only that, but this risk also increases in people under the age of 65, and in those without risk factors such as obesity or diabetes.
“It doesn’t matter your age, it doesn’t matter whether you smoke or not,” said study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly, head of research and development for the Veterans Affairs Health System in St. Louis, at Washington University in St. Louis.
The study by Al-Aly and colleagues used a large case database compiled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The research team compared more than 150,000 veterans who lived 30 days after contracting Covid-19 with two control groups who had never been infected — one control group included 5 million people who used the VA health system during the outbreak, and the other A control group with a similar number of people who used the system in 2017 (before the new coronavirus epidemic).
Heartbreaks
COVID-19 survivors had significantly increased rates of 20 cardiovascular problems in the year following infection. For example, these individuals were 52% more likely to have had a stroke than the control group during the same period—about 4 more people in the COVID-19 group than in the control group for every 1,000 study subjects .
72% higher risk of heart failure, or 12 more people in the COVID-19 group per 1,000 study subjects. Hospitalization increases the likelihood that an infected person will develop cardiovascular complications later in life, but even without hospitalization, the risk of many diseases increases.
“I’m amazed at how long the cardiovascular complications from COVID can last,” Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, wrote to Nature The risk of complications from severe illness far outweighs mild illness, the email said, and “people who have not been vaccinated need to be vaccinated as soon as possible.”
Ardehali cautions that the study is observational, so there are some limitations. For example, the control group during the same period had not been tested for COVID-19, so some of them may have been infected but had mild symptoms. Also, the authors only studied veterans, a group that is typically dominated by white males, so their results may not be representative of the entire population.
Both Ardehali and Al-Aly agree that global healthcare organizations should prepare for a surge in cardiovascular disease patients. However, Al-Aly worries that health authorities’ response to the aftermath of the outbreak will drag on as people infected with the virus continue to run on medical resources. “We’ve screwed COVID,” he said, “I feel like long COVID (long COVID) we’ll screw it up too. “
References
Original titled Heart-disease risk soars after COVID ―even with a mild case was published in the news section of Nature on February 10, 2022
nature
Copyright Notice:
2022 Springer Nature Limited. All Rights Reserved