How a wave of heart attacks in young people may be fueled by COVID
People who get sick with Covid are at higher risk of heart attacks and strokes years after the infection clears, a major study suggests.
Using data from more than 200,000 people who got Covid in 2020, researchers found that the sicker someone was, the more likely they were to develop heart problems.
Overall, being infected with Covid doubled a person’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke, at least three years after the initial infection.
And patients who were hospitalized because of the virus were four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those who did not get it.
It comes as doctors search for clues as to why the number of fatal heart attacks in people under 45 is increasing. Some point to the Covid virus as the cause.
Data shows that the number of heart attacks is increasing, Dr. Bhatt said, but doctors still disagree on what could be causing the increase.
Two weeks after he became ill at Covid TV, doctor Xand van Tulleken thought he was on the mend, when he suddenly got worse
Dr. Stanley Hazen, chairman of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences at the Cleveland Clinic and co-author of the study, said: ‘The results include nearly a quarter of a million people and indicate a finding of global healthcare significance that could translate into an explanation for an increase in cardiovascular diseases around the world.’
People have been sounding the alarm about this connection since the start of the pandemic.
Dr. Xand van Tullken, a doctor and TV commentator, experienced this firsthand when he noticed his heart started beating irregularly in March 2020.
He was sweaty, panicked and out of breath, and was rushed to the emergency room.
There, doctors gave him chest shocks and medication to get his heart back into normal rhythm, saving him from heart failure.
The previously healthy father-of-two later said he believes he developed this heart condition as a result of Covid.
The new study, which cardiologists from the American Heart Association published in the journal Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and vascular biologylooked back on these early days of the pandemic.
It included 10,005 British adults aged around 70 who tested positive for Covid between February and December 2020, before vaccines were available.
They compared their findings with more than 200,000 other respondents who did not have Covid. Doctors followed them for three years after their first Covid test to see how they were doing.
They found that people who had contracted the virus were generally more likely to have complications related to the cardiovascular system – such as heart attack, stroke and cardiac arrest – than those who did not have the disease. This risk persisted for the three years the doctors followed the participants.
This also applied if the doctors took into account conditions that would put a patient at greater risk of developing heart disease in the first place, such as diabetes or older diagnoses of heart disease.
After analyzing the data, doctors found that those who had been hospitalized with the virus were four times more likely to develop heart disease than those who had never contracted the disease.
There are several ways this virus can cause heart problems, the study authors say.
First, when someone gets sick with Covid, it causes inflammation all over the body.
Research has shown that this can put pressure on blood vessels, increasing the risk of blood clots.
Blood clots can lead to a heart attack or stroke, blocking normal blood flow.
Furthermore, in rare cases, Covid can cause inflammation of the heart muscle itself, causing a life-threatening condition called myocarditis, which can damage the organ.
This can also cause plaques to build up in the heart, leading to a greater risk of heart disease.
People without an O blood group were 65 percent more likely to have a heart attack and stroke in the three years after being infected with Covid than people with an O blood group.
Many organizations have stopped tracking the number of COVID cases. But according to the most recent counts, the cumulative number of cases in the US is almost 100 million
Recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics showing a 66 percent increase in heart attacks among young people suggests the pandemic may be playing a role.
Finally, studies have shown that Covid can cause the electrical impulses that control the heart to go haywire, leading to an irregular heartbeat. This can cause heart failure and stroke.
Dr. Susan Cheng, the director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging at the Smidt Heart Institute, who studied heart attacks in young people, suggests that the same mechanisms are at play even in young, healthy bodies.
Dr. Cheng told TODAY, “There are a lot of things that COVID can do to the cardiovascular system.” She added: I would like to say that we will come out the other side and we will be able to think of COVID more like the common cold. Unfortunately that is not the case.’
In addition to looking at the overall results, the AHA researchers also looked to see how people’s blood types might have affected their results after contracting Covid. They found that people with blood type A, B or AB who got Covid had a 65 percent greater risk of heart attack and stroke than people with blood type O.
About 55 percent of Americans have a non-O blood type.
The authors are not sure what the cause could be, but the results suggest that something in the O blood group genes makes people more resilient to the effects of Covid.
Dr. Sandeep Das, chair of the AHA’s Covid-19 Cardiovascular Disease Registry, who was not involved in the study, said: ‘This is really fascinating, and I look forward to seeing scientists discover what the specific pathway could be.’
