Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale Medical School, said he worries about two types of Covid long. There is a clear version where people suffer prolonged viral symptoms like fatigue and a sneaky version in which people recover but carry extra risk of blood clots and stroke.
He doesn’t want to freak people out – most of us will probably be fine. But new studies confirm that some people are at increased risk of blood clots, stroke or heart attack. Given that most people have had Covid so far, people should be more vigilant about early warning signs like chest painunusual swelling, numbness or weakness, or sudden changes in balance, voice, or vision.
Scary reports began to emerge in the spring of 2020 of young people suffering fatal strokes during or shortly after. fallopian tube infection. Doctors began to suspect Covid was not only a respiratory disease but also a vascular disease. Larger studies have now proven their suspicions and show that Covid infections increase people’s risk of illness. That explains why young people who should have been at virtually no risk of stroke emerge, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Patients who have ever smoked or have high blood pressure or diabetes are at an even higher risk.
(Also read: Health tips to rebuild your work life after a heart attack)
A recent study, published in the journal Heart – affiliated with the British Medical Journal – followed 54,000 people in the UK for four and a half months and concluded that those infected were at increased risk for venous thromboembolism. 2.7 times higher – a dangerous type of blood clot – than people who have never been infected.
The study also showed that people who were infected but not sick enough to be hospitalized were still 10 times more likely to die from any cause during the study period than those who were not infected. People who were hospitalized with Covid-19 were about 100 times more likely to die during the study period.
Another new study published in the journal Neurosurgery focuses on the period when people have an active infection and concludes that Covid-19 infection is linked to strokes, and strokes occur in infected people. potentially more serious and difficult to treat with surgery.
Krumholz, who I met before the pandemic through his work on improving the way doctors conduct and evaluate studies, said they still don’t have enough data to know these risks. how much to reduce with vaccination, or how long the increased risk lasts. He said the medical community has long known that the virus can have lasting consequences, but until this pandemic, it had never been so thoroughly studied.
Consensus is forming that long-term damage is caused by inflammation – a necessary part of our immune defenses, but a part that can be harmful if it remains elevated.
Not everyone with Covid will develop severe vasculitis, but the disease is still “something of a dice” — or, as Dr Ziyad Al-Aly says, Russian Roulette. That doesn’t mean people should despair or panic. Early treatment can save lives, which is why doctors recommend that people who have been infected don’t ignore any warning signs, even if they weren’t at any risk before.
Al-Aly, who works at the St. Louis, was one of the first doctors to begin a long-term study of Covid and its consequences in general. “There is something about SARS-CoV-2 that increases its tendency to damage the lining of blood vessels and increase blood clotting,” he said.
“What makes this disease so dangerous is mainly that it attacks these blood vessels,” says Pascal Jabbour, a neurosurgeon at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. The disease can lead to inflammation of blood vessels throughout the body, including the intestines, causing a condition called intestinal ischemia, he says. It is also at the root of a circulatory problem known as covid toe.
Jabbour is the lead author of the paper on Neurosurgery. I interviewed him in the spring of 2020, after he led one of the few very small studies that showed a preliminary but disturbing link between stroke and Covid.
His newer study looked at 575 stroke patients – some with Covid and some without. They found that people with Covid had a worse performance and were more difficult to treat with surgery to open blocked vessels. The infected group consisted of younger, healthier people than the uninfected group of stroke patients, which is what you would expect to see to see if infection raises the risk on a large scale.
Some of the people in the infected group had mild infections, and a few didn’t know they had Covid until they arrived at the hospital with a stroke, Jabbour said. This further complicates the already complicated task of counting Covid deaths. Should people who appear to have died from a stroke and test positive be counted as dead with Covid or from Covid?
Even neutral things like heart disease risk are politicized when it intersects with the pandemic. “You can’t imagine the attacks I received,” Jabbour said, after he appeared on CNN in 2020 to discuss his initial observations and research findings. That polarization has only deepened – with some refusing to believe that Covid can have a lasting effect, and others posting terrifying stories that the harsh shutdown continues in China. is part of a plan to win over the West as a prolonged Covid-19 collapses our workforce.
The reality is that some people have been devastated by Covid, even as most fully recover. It takes time, good studies, and lots of cases to understand the consequences of infection, and that information comes from the countries with the most cases. The take-home message is that even if you feel well, past Covid infections are a cardiovascular risk factor, just like elevated cholesterol. That’s not a reason to despair, but it’s a very good reason to be vigilant.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist on science. She is the host of the podcast “Science Tracker”.
This story has been published from the electronic agency’s feed with no modifications to the text. Only the title has been changed.
