A big-scale study found that individuals who battled COVID-19 are still at a better risk of dying around 18 months after their initial infection.
Researchers looked into the heart problems (CVD) and death risks amongst COVID-19 patients in a latest study published Wednesday within the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) journal Cardiovascular Research.
The team evaluated the short- and long-term associations between COVID-19 and the event of CVD and mortality in the overall population using data from nearly 160,000 participants.
The participants were identified from the U.K. Biobank, they usually battled the coronavirus disease between March 2020 and November 2020. They were tracked for as much as 18 months to see the short-term and long-term implications of the viral infection.
Each participant was randomly matched up with as much as 10 people without COVID-19 from two cohort studies. The scientists particularly looked into the COVID-19-positive participants’ CVD and mortality risks inside three weeks of diagnosis (acute phase) and after this era (post-acute phase).
After analyzing the information, the scientists found that the likelihood of COVID-19 patients dying was about 81 times higher than uninfected individuals inside the first 21 days of infection. The probability remained five times higher for so long as 18 months after infection.
“COVID-19 patients were more prone to develop quite a few cardiovascular conditions in comparison with uninfected participants, which can have contributed to their higher risks of death,” study writer Professor Ian C.K. Wong of the University of Hong Kong, China, said, as quoted by Medical Xpress.
Wong and his colleagues found in the middle of their study that COVID-19 patients were 4 times more prone to develop major heart problems than uninfected individuals within the acute phase and 40% more likely within the post-acute phase
“The findings indicate that patients with COVID-19 needs to be monitored for no less than a 12 months after recovering from the acute illness to diagnose cardiovascular complications of the infection, which form a part of long COVID,” Wong added.
Meanwhile, a unique study published within the journal Nature last month found that SARS-CoV-2 could stay within the brain for as much as 8 months after initial infection. The invention could help the continued efforts of the medical community to higher understand long COVID and its various manifestations affecting multiple organs.