What do we know about Long Covid, the long-term effects of the Coronavirus
According to what was published in the journal Nature, a series of studies confirm that the risk of cardiovascular problems, such as stroke and heart attack, remains high even months after contracting the Covid-19 infection: “The contagion can permanently alter the health of some people, reducing their quality of life in the long run ”.
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What do we know about Long Covid, the long-term effects of the Coronavirus
The risk of cardiovascular problems, such as stroke e heart attackremains high even months after contracting Covid-19 infection.
This is what emerges from a series of studies published in the journal Nature, the last of which was made by Ziyad Al-Aly, epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and his colleagues.
Researchers compared more than 150,000 veterans who had recovered from acute Covid-19 with their uninfected peers, as well as with a pre-pandemic control group to estimate how often SARS-CoV-2 infection leads. to cardiovascular problems.
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The analysis found that people who had had the disease faced substantially greater risks for 20 cardiovascular conditions in the year following Sars-CoV-2 infection. And even those who weren’t hospitalized had increased risk for many conditions, ranging from an 8% increase in heart attack rate to a 247% increase in heart attack rate. heart inflammation.
For Al-Aly, the study added to the growing body of evidence that a Covid-19 attack can permanently alter the health of some people, reducing their quality of life in the long run.
Meanwhile, researchers are also trying to figure out who is most at risk for these heart problems, how long the risk persists, and what causes these symptoms. Nature examines the questions scientists are asking and the answers they have uncovered so far. Despite its large size, the VA study comes with some caveats, the researchers say. The study is observational, which means it reuses the collected data for other purposes, a method that can introduce bias. For example, the study considers only i veteranswhich means that the data is biased towards white men. “We really don’t have any such studies that cover a more diverse and younger population,” he says Eric Topol, a genomist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, believing that more research is needed before scientists can truly quantify how often these cardiovascular problems occur.
But despite this, the values tend to be right.
Another study found that, in the 4 months following infection, people who had Covid-19 had a risk of heart failure approximately 2.5 times greater than those that were not infected. Sarah Wulf Hanson of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington in Seattle used data from Al-Aly to estimate how many heart attacks and strokes Covid-19 has been associated with. Well, his unpublished work shows how, in 2020, complications after Covid-19 caused 12,000 more strokes and 44,000 more heart attacks in the United States, numbers that have risen to 18,000 strokes and 66,000 heart attacks in 2021.
This means that Covid-19 would have increased i heart attack rates of around 8% and stroke rates of around 2%. The indirect effects of the pandemic, such as missed doctor visits, stress, and the sedentary nature of home isolation, have likely further contributed to the cardiovascular burden for many people, the scientists suggest. Nature. But these are still hypotheses and numerous studies have been launched to give an answer to the problem.