Study: Severe COVID raised risk of heart attack, stroke as much as having heart diseaseEmily Alpert Reyes | (TNS) Los Angeles TimesLOS 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. 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. “Your genetics actually plays a role in this increased risk of developing future heart attacks and stroke,” said James Hilser, a Keck doctoral candidate in biochemistry and molecular medicine who helped write the paper. Researchers also cautioned that some COVID patients may have had undiagnosed heart disease when they were hospitalized, which would not be evident in the UK Biobank data.

Source: Los Angeles Times October 17, 2024 19:58 UTC