People who get sick with Covid are at a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes years after clearing the infection, a major study suggests.
Using data from over 200,000 people from the United Kingdom with an average age of 67 who caught Covid in 2020, researchers found the more sick someone was, the more likely they were to develop heart problems.
Overall, being infected with Covid doubled someone’s risk of 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 didn’t get it.
This new research comes as other doctors search for clues as to why fatal heart attacks in people under 45 have been increasing. Some point to the Covid virus as a cause.
Dr Stanley Hazen, the chair of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences at Cleveland Clinic and co-author of the study, said: ‘The results included nearly a quarter million people and point to a finding of global health care importance that may translate into an explanation for a rise in cardiovascular disease around the world.’
People have been sounding the alarm about this link since early in the pandemic. Dr Xand van Tullken, a doctor and TV commentator, experienced this firsthand when he noticed his heart began beating irregularly in March 2020.
He was sweaty, panicked and breathless, and was rushed into the emergency room. There, doctors shocked his chest and put him on medication to get his heart back into it’s 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, which was published cardiologists from the American Heart Association (AHA) in the journal Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, looked back to these early days of the pandemic.
It included 10,005 UK-based adults around age 50-86 who tested positive for Covid between February and December 2020, before vaccines were available.
They compared their findings to over 200,000 other survey repliers who did not have Covid. Doctors followed them for three years after their initial Covid test to see how they fared.
