LOS ANGELES – People hospitalized for COVID-19 early within the pandemic had an increased risk of significant “cardiac events” comparable to heart attacks and strokes, much like individuals with a history of heart disease, a newly published study found.
Researchers from USC, UCLA and the Cleveland Clinic analyzed greater than 10,000 COVID cases tracked by the UK Biobank to look at how COVID affected the chance of heart attacks and other heart threats.
Their study was published on Wednesday Journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biologyevaluated outcomes for individuals who became ailing in the primary yr of the pandemic and followed them over a period of nearly three years.
The findings underscore that in “people who have no evidence of heart disease, severe COVID disease poses a significantly increased risk of heart attack, stroke and death,” said lead researcher Hooman Allayee, a professor of population and public health sciences at Keck USC School of Medicine.
One of essentially the most striking findings: Hospitalization for COVID in 2020 increased the chance of heart attacks and other cardiac events a lot that it was ultimately comparable to individuals who had heart disease previously but had not had COVID, the study found .
Although the evaluation showed that the extra risk was particularly large in individuals with severe cases, the researchers emphasized that it was still evident in patients who had contracted some type of COVID.
The study found that this risk was about twice as high in individuals who had been infected with COVID in any respect levels of severity and 4 times as high in hospitalized cases as in individuals who had not had COVID.
The study notes that the increased risk “shows no obvious signs of abatement up to nearly three years after SARS-CoV-2 infection and suggests that COVID-19 continues to pose a significant public health burden with ongoing negative effects cardiovascular risks,” they wrote.
Scientists also found that risk varies by blood type: Hospitalization for COVID increased the chance more in individuals with blood types A, B, or AB than in individuals with blood type O.
“Your genetics actually play a role in this increased risk of future heart attacks and strokes,” said James Hilser, a Keck doctoral student in biochemistry and molecular medicine who helped write the paper.
Allayee said that when someone walks into a health care provider's office and is newly diagnosed with diabetes, “it doesn't matter what their cholesterol is… They're prescribed a lipid-lowering medication. They're prescribed a baby aspirin.”
But when doctors take into consideration heart attack prevention, “no one takes COVID — whether serious or not — into account when treating a patient,” Allayee said. Given the outcomes, he said, “This is something that doctors should be discussing,” as should cardiac care regulators.
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, had some limitations: It only checked out COVID cases early within the pandemic, before vaccines became available. (Another study A study published earlier this yr, which also relied on UK Biobank data, found that the incidence of heart attacks and strokes was generally lower after each dose of a COVID vaccine.)
The researchers also warned that some COVID patients could have had undiagnosed heart disease after they were hospitalized, which might not be apparent within the UK Biobank data.
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