A recent study showed that COVID-19 infection increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death for up to three years in unvaccinated individuals, especially during the early stages of the pandemic when the original SARS-CoV-2 strain was prevalent. Was.

The research, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), America’s top medical research agency, which included people with and without pre-existing heart disease, confirmed earlier findings that Covid-19 Has been linked to a greater chance of heart problems.

However, it is the first to suggest that these risks may increase up to three years after initial infection, especially for people infected during the first wave of the pandemic.

What does the study say?

The study found that people who contracted COVID-19 early on had double the risk of cardiovascular events compared to people who never had the virus. Severe COVID-19 cases were associated with nearly four times the risk.

These findings were recently published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

Dr. David Goff, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), said the study provides important insight into the long-term cardiovascular effects of COVID-19.

He noted that further research is necessary to validate the findings, which could help develop strategies to prevent heart disease in people who have had severe Covid-19 cases.

A new aspect of research is focusing on the possible genetic link between blood type and increased risk of heart attack or stroke in severe COVID-19 patients.

The study found that people with A, B, or AB blood types were more than twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke after being hospitalized for COVID-19, while people with O blood type had half the risk. Was less.

The analysis is based on data from 10,000 participants in the UK Biobank, a comprehensive biomedical database of European patients aged 40 to 69.

Of these, 8,000 people tested positive for COVID-19, while 2,000 were hospitalized with severe illness between February and December 2020, before vaccines were available.

Researchers compared these groups with about 218,000 individuals who had never been infected with the virus. They tracked the participants for about three years to track the incidence of heart attacks, strokes or deaths.

Adjusting for people who already had heart disease, about 11% of both groups, the researchers found that the risk of cardiovascular events was twice as high for Covid-19 patients and four times as high for those with severe disease.

The increased risk persisted throughout the three-year follow-up, sometimes equaling or even exceeding known risk factors such as type 2 diabetes.

The study’s lead author, Hooman Allayi of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, highlighted the global implications of these findings, noting that more than a billion people have already been infected with COVID-19.

“The question now is whether severe COVID-19 should be considered another risk factor for heart disease, like type 2 diabetes or peripheral artery disease, where treatment focused on heart disease prevention may be valuable,” he said. “

Alaayi also noted that these results mainly apply to people infected during the early pandemic stages, and it remains uncertain whether more recent severe Covid-19 cases (from 2021) have similar long-term cardiovascular risks.

Limitations of the Study

However, the researchers acknowledged that the study had limitations, as it only included data from the predominantly white UK Biobank.

More research is needed to determine whether these findings hold true in more diverse populations. Since participants were not vaccinated, future studies will need to assess whether the vaccines impact cardiovascular risk.

The authors said that more research is also needed to clarify the link between blood type and COVID-19, as the exact mechanism behind this link remains unclear.