(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) A study of the long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19 suggested that the disease “takes a serious toll on heart health” up to a year after recovery, according to Science magazine.
“In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes, greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity,” Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, told Science.
The study, which was published in Nature Medicine on February 7, 2022, used data provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to analyze the effect of COVID-19 on heart health.
“Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial,” the study authors wrote.
“We show that, beyond the first 30 days after infection, individuals with COVID-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease spanning several categories, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease,” they continued.
Lead author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, told NBC that the increased risk “was evident [among] younger adults, older adults, black people, white people, people with obesity and those without.”
The study appeared to show that vaccination status made no difference in the results.
“Our analyses censoring participants at time of vaccination and controlling for vaccination as a time-varying covariate show that the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis reported in this study is significant in people who were not vaccinated and is evident regardless of vaccination status,” the authors reported.
But the Daily Skeptic reported that the study actually shows that “heart problems after COVID are much worse for the vaccinated,” and that the study hid the results in an appendix.
“Hidden in the legends of the supplementary tables the authors reveal that 62% of the Covid patients had been vaccinated compared to 56% of the non-infected controls (not a great advert for vaccine effectiveness against infection),” Dr. Clare Craig reported.
