It’s estimated that more than 3.5 million Americans were hospitalized for COVID-19 between May 2020 and April 2021, per a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Since then, research studies have identified more than 200 symptoms associated with the highly contagious virus, especially as it pertains to Long COVID, including brain fog, extreme tiredness, and difficulty breathing. And now, researchers claim COVID can make you more susceptible to life-threatening medical events like heart attack and stroke.
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A new study published in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology found that catching COVID can “significantly” increase your risk of having a cardiac emergency, such as heart attack or stroke, for up to three years following a positive test result.
Researchers pulled 10,005 medical records from the UK Biobank to analyze the correlation between positive COVID test results and coronary artery disease risk. Among this cohort, 1,943 individuals received hospital care to treat their infections. They focused on a 10-month period from Feb. 1, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2020. (It’s important to note that at this time, COVID vaccines weren’t available yet.)
According to their findings, people sick with COVID were twice as likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke for almost three years post-infection compared with those who didn’t get sick.
Additionally, severe cases of COVID that led to hospitalization put humans at an even greater risk of coronary artery disease risk. That number stands at 3.85 percent, per the study.
Moreover, the study’s authors reported that a hospitalization-level COVID case proved to be just as big of a cardiovascular risk factor as having a history of heart disease.
These statistics weren’t particularly daunting to Mayo Clinic cardiologist Patricia Best, MD, who told CNN, “We have known for some time that infections raise your risk of having a heart attack.”
However, the timestamp of how long COVID’s heart risk implications can follow you is another story.
“If you have influenza, if you get any kind of infection…whether it’s bacterial or viral, that increases your risk of having a heart attack…but it generally goes away pretty quickly after your infection,” she continued. “This is just such a large effect, and I think it’s just because of how different Covid is than some of the other infections.”
The study didn’t go into depth explaining why COVID takes such a heavy, long-lasting hit on the heart. Doctors not associated with the study say more research is needed to better understand this.
One of the study’s authors, Hooman Allayee, a biochemistry and molecular genetics professor, hypothesized, “There might just be something that Covid does to the artery walls and the vascular system that is sustained damage and just continues to manifest over time.”
According to Stanley Hazen, Cleveland Clinic’s Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences chairman, the long-lasting risk of heart attack and stroke for COVID patients is “one of the more interesting” and “surprising findings” to come from the study.
Going forward, “If you’ve had Covid, we have to be especially attentive to making sure that we’re doing everything possible to lower your cardiovascular risk,” Hazen said.
