Heart Disease Risk’shoot up after covid† Corona turns out to be an even greater risk factor for cardiovascular disease’than smoking or obesity† There was a lot of fuss in recent days after American epidemiologists in the trade journal Nature Medicine revealed that people who recovered from corona run one and a half to four times increased risk of all kinds of cardiovascular diseases in the following year.
Twenty ailments ran through the Americans, from stroke to heart failure and from ventricular fibrillation to pulmonary embolism. And the risk after corona appeared to be increased on all outcomes. Also in otherwise healthy people and people who did not smoke, in younger people and in people who simply get sick at home. Take heart failure: for every 1,000 recovered patients, one can expect an extra 10 to 12 cases, compared to a comparable group who did not have corona.
Shocking results, also judged by outsiders. ‘These are all very serious conditions’, as the American cardiologist Eric Topol puts it in trade magazine science† “If anyone ever thought that Covid is like the flu, this is one of the strongest studies to back that up.”
Constraint
An ‘important study’ that ‘shows clearly that there are more risks from corona than during the acute phase of illness alone’, emphasizes internist-infectiologist Chantal Bleeker-Rovers (Radboud UMC) when asked. Yet she also sees important ifs and buts. For example, the study was conducted during the very first corona wave among American veterans, a group that is older on average and more often men. ‘You can’t translate this one-on-one to the current situation,’ she says. ‘We now have other variants and most people have been vaccinated.’
Jaime Borjas, a Dutch epidemiologist who is doing his PhD in London on thrombosis after an infection, points to another limitation: it seems that many mild corona cases were not included in the study. That will have boosted the numbers. The more severe the inflammation, the more severe the side effects afterwards.
The Americans indeed saw by far the most cardiovascular diseases in people who had been hospitalized with corona. ‘That’s not unexpected. Your body is fully engaged in all kinds of recovery work, even after you have left the hospital, and that increases the chance of these kinds of problems,’ says Borjas. “Maybe that will bring out an event that would have happened anyway.”
Individual cases
It is also conceivable that the increased risk will diminish after a while, Bleeker thinks. ‘That makes sense, if you assume that the cause is a long-lasting inflammatory reaction. Perhaps the increased risk will return to what it was before after that first year. That will have to become apparent from further research.’
In any case, the new study confirms the importance of vaccination, according to both the researchers themselves and other scientists. ‘In any case, because vaccination prevents you from staying out of the hospital, where the greatest risk lies,’ says Borjas.
The results are annoying for the more than 70 thousand Dutch people who have previously been in hospital with corona, Bleeker realizes. “Unfortunately I can’t reassure them 100 percent.” She does point out, however, that the abstract means ultimately say little about individual cases. ‘As an individual you can’t do much with this. If you get something in the year after your infection, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have had it without corona.’