MADRID, 9 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Even patients with mild COVID-19 infections can experience health complications for months, even years, after infection. Nearly 19% of US adults who have previously tested positive for COVID-19 report having “long COVID,” in which they experience signs and symptoms for four weeks or more after the initial phase of infection.
In an effort to quantify what long COVID means now and could mean in the future for these patients, Intermountain Health researchers have screened nearly 150,000 patients for cardiovascular symptoms and found that patients who tested positive had higher rates of chest pain in the six months to one year after infection.
“Many patients with COVID-19 experience symptoms well beyond the acute phase of infection,” said Heidi T. May, Intermountain Health, Ph.D., cardiovascular epidemiology and principal investigator of the study. “Although we did not see significant rates of major events like myocardial infarction or stroke in patients who had a mild initial infection, we did see chest pain as a persistent problem, which could be a sign of future cardiovascular complications.”
In the large retrospective study, presented at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Conference 2023, researchers compared three groups of Intermountain Health patients. On the one hand, 148,158 people aged 18 and over who tested positive for COVID and were treated on an outpatient basis between March 2020 and December 31, 2021.
On the other hand, 148,158 COVID-negative Intermountain patients of approximately the same age and sex, seen in the same months, as those who tested positive for COVID-19 and thirdly 148,158 patients seen between January 1, 2018 and January 31, 2018. August 2019, as a historical control, to account for how patients accessed healthcare differently during the worst of the pandemic.
The research team found that at six-month and one-year intervals, patients who tested positive for COVID-19 had significantly higher rates of experiencing chest pain, but saw no other increases in cardiovascular events.
“Right now, symptoms don’t necessarily translate into concrete results, but that’s something that will have to be re-evaluated over time,” says Dr. May. “It could be that the long-lasting effects of the infection on the cardiovascular system difficult to quantify in terms of diagnoses or other short-term events and may not be appreciated until longer follow-up.
