Experts are shocked by the
tremendous rise in cardiovascular events long after the body clears the virus. Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person's risk of having a severe
cardiovascular event — like stroke or heart failure — within a year after infection.
That's according to an open-access study involving more than 11
million people published earlier this month in Nature Medicine. Researchers
from the Veterans Health Administration (VA) St. Louis Health Care System and
Washington University in St. Louis collected data from patients at 1,255 health
care facilities across the United States for the study. The researchers focused
on 153,760 veterans who tested positive for COVID-19 between March 1, 2020, and
January 15, 2021 and survived the infection for at least 30 days. The
researchers then created a comparison group of 5.6 million veterans who did not
test positive for COVID-19 during the same period, as well as a second control
group of more than 5.9 million people who sought VA care in 2017.
"We've known for a long time that COVID-19 is the acute phase
of the disease and that some people can have heart attacks, blood clots, and
other complications in the first 30 days of disease... but what we didn't know
is what happens to people with COVID-19 over the longer term," said Dr.
Ziyad Al-Aly, the study's lead author and Chief of Research and Development at
the VA St. Louis healthcare system. "What becomes of them? How about six
months, eight months, or even a year down the road?"
Within a year of being infected, Al-Aly and his colleagues
discovered that even a mild COVID-19 infection increased a person's risk of
cardiovascular problems, such as heart rhythm irregularities and potentially
deadly clots in the legs and lungs failure, heart attack, and stroke.
"That means that for every 100 people infected with COVID,
four people are likely to develop a major cardiovascular event as a result of
COVID up to a year after infection," Al-Aly said. "'Oh, 4 percent,
what's the big deal?' say some. Well, many millions of people in the United
States have had COVID, which translates to a lot of people in the United States
who are having or will have serious heart problems, and I think that's
significant."
As of February 9, 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) reported 77.1 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States. More
alarmingly, the researchers discovered that people who tested positive for
COVID-19 had a 72 percent higher risk of heart failure, a 63 percent higher
risk of heart attack, and a 52 percent higher risk of stroke than those who did
not.
Because 99.7% of the infected veterans studied were unvaccinated,
the study does not address whether vaccinated people can develop long-term
cardiovascular problems after a breakthrough infection.
The results of the paper have shocked other researchers in the
field.
"Stunning... definitely worse than I expected," said
Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. "All of these conditions
are highly hazardous. If anyone ever thought COVID was the same as the flu,
this should be one of the most compelling data sets to prove that it
isn't."
But could other factors be at play that increased the risk in the
individuals who were monitored in the study?
Al-Aly told Salon that researchers were careful to control for
such factors.
"We followed people who had COVID-19 for a year and compared
them to people who had similar characteristics but did not have COVID-19,"
says Al-Aly. "We took into account age, race, sex, and all the other
factors, such as obesity and diabetes." Finally, Al-Aly claims that
COVID-19 is solely responsible for the increased risk of heart disease.
This study adds to a growing body of evidence that COVID-19, the
disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is not the same as a common
cold or flu. Instead, it resembles a cardiovascular disease in many ways; as
Salon previously reported, research from 2020 suggested that the coronavirus
could be both a respiratory infection and a blood vessel disease.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security, said, "COVID appears to trigger an inflammatory response
in certain individuals, which increases the risk of cardiovascular
disease." COVID-19-induced "systemic inflammation" has been
shown to have a "negative impact on the cardiovascular system,"
according to Adalja.
More researchers and doctors are beginning to believe that
COVID-19 is a systemic disease that affects multiple body systems rather than
merely a respiratory or cardiovascular disease. There have even been reports of
patients developing diabetes due to their Covid infection.
"It's a systemic virus that can cause long-term
manifestations on multiple organ systems," according to Al-Aly, including
the heart and kidneys. "It's critical that people begin to consider
COVID-19 as a risk factor for a serious cardiovascular event."
While diabetes is associated with an increased risk of heart
attack or stroke, Al-Aly believes that the same should be valid for people who
have survived COVID-19.
"A history with COVID is certainly a cardiovascular risk factor, and I think people need to start thinking about it from that angle," Al-Aly said.