Emily Alpert Reyes | (TNS) Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES — People hospitalized for COVID-19 early in the pandemic suffered an increased risk of serious “cardiac events” such as heart attacks and strokes that was akin to people with a history of heart disease, a newly released study has found. Researchers from USC, UCLA and the Cleveland Clinic analyzed more than 10,000 COVID cases tracked by the UK Biobank to examine how COVID affected the risk of heart attacks and other cardiac threats. Their study, released Wednesday in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology , assessed outcomes for people sickened in the first year of the pandemic and followed for a period of nearly three years.
The findings underscore that among “people who don’t have any evidence of heart disease, having severe COVID put them at a significantly increased risk of heart attack, stroke and death,” said principal investigator Hooman Allayee, professor of population and public health sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Among the most striking findings: Being hospitalized for COVID in 2020 amplified the risk of heart attacks and other cardiac events so much that it ended up being comparable to people who had a history of heart disease but who hadn’t gotten COVID, the study found. Although the analysis showed that the added risk was especially stark among people with severe cases, researchers stressed it was still apparent for patients who had gotten any form of COV.
