Massive study shows a long-term, substantial rise in risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study1 shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes. “It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.” Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The researchers compared more than 150,000 veterans who survived for at least 30 days after contracting COVID-19 with two groups of uninfected people: a group of more than five million people who used the VA medical system during the pandemic, and a similarly sized group that used the system in 2017, before SARS-CoV-2 was circulating. Troubled hearts People who had recovered from COVID-19 showed stark increases in 20 cardiovascular problems over the year after infection. For example, they were 52% more likely to have had a stroke than the contemporary control group, meaning that, out of every 1,000 people studied, there were around 4 more people in the COVID-19 group than in the control group who experienced stroke. The risk of heart failure increased by 72%, or around 12 more people in the COVID-19 group per 1,000 studied. Hospitalization increased the likelihood of future cardiovascular complications, but even people who avoided hospitalization were at higher risk for many conditions. “I am actually surprised by these findings that cardiovascular complications of COVID can last so long,” Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, wrote in an e-mail to Nature. Because severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease, Ardehali wrote, “it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately”. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0
This is why I keep shaking my head at all the messages I read online (including here at ET) by people that say... I had Covid...it was mild and nothing happened or I know someone that had Covid...they barely had a cough and just a small fever. They just don't understand the cardiovascular damage that Covid has done to their bodies today while they think they've fully recovered and are healthy. This is why anyone that has been infected with Covid should have a full complete physical that includes body scans (tests) of their cardiovascular including blood chemistry tests. It's not a good way to live life...knowing that you're a ticking time bomb for an unexplained heart attack, stroke, and other health problems within a few years after having Covid. It's like you accidentally walked into a very bad neighborhood...you're constantly looking over your shoulder. The smart ones that have been infected with Covid will at least get a life insurance policy as soon as they recovered if they already didn't have one. Those that have had Covid multiple times (reinfections) should definitely see a Doctor because it's a "warning" that something is wrong with their immune system but it could be a blessing because it will force them to see a Doctor and the Doctor then discovers a serious health problem not related to Covid that was not diagnosed. By the way, health insurance companies and hospitals/clinics know the above too. A lot of them have updated those health question forms with questions that ask you if you've had Covid in the past. Simply, they want to know how high risk of a person you are just as much as they want to know if you're a smoker. Also, I think we're going to see more athletes collapse on the playing field in the next few years that have never been vaccinated but have had Covid at least once. wrbtrader