Covid-19 patients are more likely to develop heart problems – even a year later, study finds

Complications include inflammation, blood clots, stroke and heart attack and they can affect previously healthy people, according to analysis of US data

Researcher says governments and health systems should be prepared to deal with the pandemic’s ‘likely significant contribution’ to a rise in cardiovascular disease

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The study found that cardiovascular disease occurred in 4 per cent more people who had been infected with Covid-19 than who had not. Photo: Shutterstock Images

Published: 7:35pm, 8 Feb 2022Updated: 7:47pm, 8 Feb 2022

People who have had Covid-19 are at higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease, and it can happen a year after infection, according to an analysis of US health data by Washington University researchers.

Those complications include disruptive heart rhythms, inflammation of the heart, blood clots, stroke, coronary artery disease, heart attack, heart failure or even death, said the study published in the journal Nature Medicine on Monday.

The researchers said previously healthy people and young people were among those who had developed such heart problems.

Senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, an assistant professor at Washington University’s School of Medicine in St Louis, said governments and health systems should be prepared to deal with “the likely significant contribution” of the Covid-19 pandemic to a rise in cardiovascular disease.

“Because of the chronic nature of these conditions, they will likely have long-lasting consequences for patients and health systems and also have broad implications on economic productivity and life expectancy,” Al-Aly wrote on Twitter on Monday. “Addressing the challenges posed by long Covid will require a much needed, but so far lacking, urgent and coordinated long-term global response strategy.”

Researchers compared the medical records of people who had tested positive for Covid-19 with those of patients in two control groups who had not had the disease. Photo: Bloomberg

For the study, the researchers analysed anonymous medical records in a database kept by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. They looked at the records of 153,760 people who had tested positive for Covid-19 from March 1, 2020 to January 15, 2021. This health information was compared with that of two control groups: more than 5.6 million patients who did not have Covid-19 during that period; and over 5.8 million people who were patients in 2017, before the pandemic.

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