COVID-19 may increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and deaths for three years after an infection, study suggests

COVID-19 could be a powerful risk factor for heart attacks and strokes for as long as three years after an infection, a large new study suggests.

COVID-19 could be a powerful risk factor for heart attacks and strokes for as long as three years after an infection, a large new study suggests.

The study was published Wednesday in the medical journal Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. It relied on medical records from roughly a quarter of a million people who were enrolled in a large database called the U.K. Biobank.

Within this dataset, researchers identified more than 11,000 people who had a positive lab test for COVID-19 documented in their medical records in 2020; nearly 3,000 of them had been hospitalized for their infections. They compared these groups with more than 222,000 others in the same database who didn’t have a history of COVID-19 over the same time frame.

People who caught COVID in 2020, before there were vaccines to blunt the infection, had twice the risk of a major cardiac event like a heart attack or stroke or death for almost three years after their illness, compared with the people who didn’t test positive, the study found.

If a person had been hospitalized for their infection, pointing to a more severe case, the risk of a major heart event in was even greater – more than three times higher – than for people without COVID in their medical records.

What’s more, for people who needed to be hospitalized, COVID appeared to be as potent a risk factor for future heart attacks and strokes as diabetes or peripheral artery disease, or PAD.

One study estimated that more than 3.5 million Americans were hospitalized for COVID between May 2020 and April 2021.