People who fall ill with Covid are at increased risk of heart attacks and strokes years after curing the infection, a major study suggests.
Using data from more than 200,000 people who contracted Covid in 2020, researchers found that the sicker someone was, the more likely they were to have heart problems.
Overall, being infected with Covid doubled someone’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke at least three years after the initial infection.
And patients who were hospitalized because of the virus were four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those who did not contract it.
It comes as doctors look for clues about why fatal heart attacks in people under 45 have increased. Some point to the Covid virus as the cause.
Data shows that cases of heart attacks are increasing, Dr. Bhatt said, but doctors still disagree about what could be causing the increase.
Two weeks after falling ill with Covid TV, doctor Xand van Tulleken thought he was recovering, when he suddenly took a turn for the worse.
Dr. Stanley Hazen, professor of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences at the Cleveland Clinic and co-author of the study, said: “The results included almost a quarter of a million people and point to a finding of importance for global healthcare that can be translated in an explanation for an increase in cardiovascular diseases around the world.’
People have been sounding the alarm about this link since early in the pandemic.
Doctor and TV commentator Dr.
He was sweating, panicked and out of breath, and was rushed to the emergency room.
There, doctors shocked him in the chest and prescribed medication to get his heart back to its normal rhythm, saving him from heart failure.
The previously healthy father-of-two later shared that he believes he developed this heart condition as a result of Covid.
The new study, published by American Heart Association cardiologists in the journal Atherosclerosis thrombosis and vascular biologyHe remembered these first days of the pandemic.
It included 10,005 UK-resident adults aged around 70 who tested positive for Covid between February and December 2020, before vaccines were available.
They compared their findings with those of more than 200,000 respondents who did not have Covid. Doctors followed them for three years after their initial Covid test to see how they were doing.
They found that people who contracted the virus were generally more likely to suffer complications related to the cardiovascular system (such as heart attacks, strokes and cardiac arrest) than those who did not have the disease. This risk persisted during the three years that doctors monitored the participants.
It was also true even when doctors took into account conditions that would make a patient more likely to develop heart disease in the first place, such as diabetes or older heart disease diagnoses.
After analyzing the data, doctors found that those who were hospitalized with the virus were four times more likely to develop heart disease than those who never contracted the virus.
There are several ways this virus may be causing heart problems, the study authors say.
On the one hand, when someone gets sick with Covid, it causes inflammation throughout the body.
Research has shown that this can put pressure on blood vessels, increasing the risk of blood clots.
Blood clots can cause a heart attack or stroke by blocking normal blood flow.
Additionally, in rare cases, Covid can cause inflammation of the heart muscle itself, leading to a life-threatening condition called myocarditis, which can damage the organ.
This can also cause plaques to build up in the heart, increasing the chance of heart disease.
People without blood type O were 65 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack and stroke in the three years after infection with Covid than those with blood type O.
Many organizations have stopped tracking the number of COVID cases. But the most recent counts put the cumulative number of U.S. cases near 100 million.
Recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing the rate of heart attacks in young people increasing by 66 percent, suggests the pandemic may be playing a role.
Finally, studies have shown that Covid can cause the electrical impulses that control the heart to go haywire, causing an irregular heartbeat. This can cause heart failure and stroke.
Dr. Susan Cheng, The director of the Smidt Heart Institute’s Healthy Aging Research Institute, who has studied heart attacks in young people, suggests that these same mechanisms are at play even in young, healthy bodies.
Dr. Cheng told TODAY: “There are a lot of things that COVID can do to the cardiovascular system.” She added: I’d love to say that we’re… coming out on the other side and can think of COVID more like a common cold. Unfortunately, that is not the case.”
In addition to looking at overall results, AHA researchers also looked at how people’s blood types may have affected their results after contracting Covid. They found that people with blood types A, B or AB who contracted Covid were 65 percent more likely to have a heart attack and stroke than people with blood types O.
About 55 percent of Americans have a non-O blood type.
The authors are not sure what could be causing it, but the results suggest that something in the genes for blood type O makes people more resistant to the effects of Covid.
Dr. Sandeep Das, president of the AHA’s Covid-19 cardiovascular disease registry, who was not involved in the study, said: “This is really fascinating and I look forward to seeing scientists figure out what the specific pathway may be.”