The news comes at a time when new studies have revealed that Covid infection has severely raised the risk of heart disease, especially among the younger age groups. A study based on the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs data, people who had contracted Covid face a substantially high risk of cardiovascular issues, including heart attack and stroke. These problems may also happen in people who had relatively mild Covid and have fully recovered from it.
In a recent study published in a journal, Nature, it was reported that people who recovered from severe Covid had extremely high risk of developing cardiac issues till a year later, including heart swelling and lung thromboembolism, which were up to 20-time higher than those uninfected. A study at Yale University reported the presence of an excessive number of auto-antibodies in the people hospitalised with severe Covid. Most of these antibodies are against one’s own tissues and cells and can inadvertently attack the body tissues, including the heart, and weaken their architecture. The coronavirus enters through the ACE2 receptor found in organs and tissues such as the lungs, neurons, liver, kidney, intestine and also the heart and blood vessels. The clots may block the blood supply to vital organs like the heart or brain and cause heart attack or stroke, respectively.
Key findings
- In the year before the pandemic, there were 143,787 heart attack deaths; within the first year of the pandemic, this number had increased by 14% to 164,096.
- The excess in acute myocardial infarction-associated mortality has persisted throughout the pandemic, even during the most recent period marked by a surge of the presumed less-virulent Omicron variant.
- Researchers found that although acute myocardial infarction deaths during the pandemic increased across all age groups, the relative rise was most significant for the youngest group, ages 25 to 44.
- By the second year of the pandemic, the “observed” compared to “predicted” rates of heart attack death had increased by 29.9% for adults ages 25-44, by 19.6% for adults ages 45-64, and by 13.7% for adults age 65 and older.
What experts say
Dr Viveka Kumar, Principal Director & Chief of Cath Labs (Pan Max) – Cardiac Sciences says, “Recently, we have seen a lot of young people dying of acute heart attack and cardiac arrest in particular while doing physical activity like dancing, driving, at wedding ceremonies and all. Waves spurred by Omicron are lighter but they have got their own effect,” “Vaccine is not a complete answer yet because vaccines also led to certain side effects and caused cardiac events. There are people who have had only vaccines and within a week or a month’s time, we saw that a patient came down with a heart attack. Side effects of the vaccine are of lesser intensity but Covid infection is causing increased cardiovascular events especially cardiac arrest,” adds Dr Kumar.
