“Some people may think 4% is a small number, but it’s not, given the magnitude of the pandemic,” stated Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “That translates to roughly 3 million people in the U.S. who have suffered cardiovascular complications due to COVID-19.”
Researchers analyzed deidentified medical records from a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs database to create a controlled dataset of health information on 153,760 people who tested positive for COVID-19 from March 1, 2020, through Jan. 15, 2021, and who survived the first 30 days. The study did not include data on delta or omicron variants.
COVID-19 patients were 72 percent more likely to suffer from coronary artery disease, 63 percent more likely to have a heart attack and 52 percent more likely to experience a stroke, the study found.
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