Large study: COVID-19 significantly raises risk of cardiovascular problems

‘Substantial’ increase in risk of 20 heart issues one year after even mild COVID-19 infections.

Israel National News 

Hospital

Since early 2020, it was clear that COVID-19 causes a myriad of cardiovascular problems, including blood clots, heart failure, heart inflammation, and more.

A new study assessed the cardiovascular outcomes for recovered COVID-19 patients, one year after their recovery from the initial infection. The study, which analyzed over 11 million US veterans’ health records, found that the risk of 20 different cardiovascular problems was “substantial” in those who had COVID-19 one year earlier, compared to those who were not infected with the virus.

The study, published in Nature Medicine earlier this week, also showed that this risk remained constant for every outcome, even for those who were not hospitalized.

“Beyond the first 30 days after infection, individuals with COVID-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease spanning several categories, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease,” the study said.

“These risks and burdens were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care). Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial.”

The research analyzed electronic health records in the US, at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). It included nearly 154,000 people who contracted COVID-19 between March 2020 and January 2021, and who survived at least 30 days after becoming infected. It also included, as control groups, 5,637,647 people who sought VA care during the pandemic but were not diagnosed with COVID-19, and 5,859,411 people who sought VA care in 2017.

To ensure that the results would reflect only COVID-19, and not a vaccine, the study excluded anyone who had received a COVID-19 vaccine.

“The results suggested that COVID-19 was associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in both analyses,” the authors wrote.

Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research, told Science that the results are “stunning” and “worse” than expected.

“All of these are very serious disorders,” Science quoted Topol as saying. “If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.”

He added that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”

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In an e-mail to Nature, Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, wrote: “I am actually surprised by these findings that cardiovascular complications of COVID can last so long.” He added that because severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease, “it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately.”

“In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, told Science. Tereshchenko, who recently conducted a similar but smaller analysis, emphasized that the new study will need to be replicated, and that it was retrospective.

“It looked back. We have to do prospective studies to calculate accurate estimates,” she explained.

Senior study author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St Louis Health Care system, told Science, “This is clearly evidence of long-term heart and vascular damage. Similar things could be happening in the brain and other organs resulting in symptoms characteristic of Long Covid, including brain fog.”

Nature quoted Al-Aly as warning, “We collectively dropped the ball on COVID. And I feel we’re about to drop the ball on long COVID.”

Though the study was the largest to date, it included a rather homogenous group of veterans: 90% of patients were men, and 71-76% were white. On average, the patients were in their early 60s, Science added.

But Al-Aly said the study controlled for this bias, emphasizing to Science, “COVID is an equal opportunity offender. We found an increased risk of cardiovascular problems in old people and in young people, in people with diabetes and without diabetes, in people with obesity and people without obesity, in people who smoked and who never smoked.”

“What really worries me is that some of these conditions are chronic conditions that will literally scar people for a lifetime. It’s not like you wake up tomorrow and suddenly no longer have heart failure,” he added.

Meanwhile, the study’s authors warned, “Governments and health systems around the world should be prepared to deal with the likely significant contribution of the COVID-19 pandemic to a rise in the burden of cardiovascular diseases.”

February 11, 2022 | 4 Comments »

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  1. @Adam

    The article you shared regarding antihistamines is very interesting. I suspect the antihistamine she is referencing but not naming is pepsid. Early in the pandemic, it was demonstrated, based on 3-D analysis of the virus, that several over-the-counter drugs could be used to compete with the virus and, therefore, might be useful as treatments of Covid disease. Among these products, pepsid appeared to pose among the greatest potentials as a treatment for Covid disease. Dr. Malone, ironically enough, demonstrated a serious potential for pepsid to be used as a medical treatment to Covid in March 2020. It took him til Oct-Nov of 2021 to have his research published and then til Dec for the NIH to authorize further testing. He has a current trial ongoing today to demonstrate the benefits of pespid in a randomize control trial. His DOD drug trial was suppose to be a joint pepsid-IVM coctail being tested, but the NIH forced him to drop IVM in order to get the funding authorized and DOD grew frustrated and finally told Malone to simple drop IVM and get the testing started. They have known of Malone’s work for 2yrs now and only last month authorized further testing. As Malone has stated, several times, the US govt is simply acting without any regard to the law. Addionally, they simply have no shame for the lives they have ruined, none at all.

  2. @Adam
    The article on Arutz Sheva can be found here:
    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/321238
    The very first sentence states that

    A recent study published on January 25, 2022, on JAMA Network, has shown that the risk of myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccination is around 133 times greater than the background risk in the population.

    This statement is not accurate as stated. Arutz Sheva has done a great service actually reporting the research, and they do a good job beyond this statement. Dr. Johnson was quite correct that the paper was badly written, but I suspect this was not by chance. The research shows that male children aged 12-17 taking the Pfizer vax have an increased occurrence of myocarditis that is 133X greater than the background risk and this is horrifying. As the ages go up this risk drops. The following chart demonstrates the factor for each age group for men.

    Age Phizer Moderna

    12-17 133.5 NA
    16-17 79.0 42.0
    18-24 29.8 13.7
    25-29 11.9 5.5
    30-39 11.3 6.8
    40-49 4.5 1.1
    50-64 0.9 0.7
    >64 NA NA

    These findings are badly under-rated as Dr. Johnson notes, but it is worse than he shares. The number of people whose cases are recorded in VAERS is woefully low, of course, but the standard by which a case of myocarditis was evaluated as myocarditis by this research group is extremely rigid. It required an CMR, which is a heart MRI, or a heart biopsy to confirm a diagnosis of myocarditis as certain. Most cases of myocarditis, especially after the vaccines were labeled as causing myocarditis are diagnosed based on presumptive diagnosis. Presumptive diagnosis are based on a patient’s medical history and clinical signs alone. Due to the enormous expense associated with the CMR and heart biopsies, this is very common, but there has to be a reason to suspect myocarditis, eg that the patient was recently given a vaccine associated with myocarditis – prior to June 2021, this was not true and many many cases should be presumed to have been skipped due to this fact. Based on a presumptive diagnosis, a doctor will treat the patient accordingly and watch for clinical signs to regress. None of the presumptive diagnoses of myocarditis will be included in the numbers listed above. As Dr. McCullough noted, myocarditis has two presentations, one with symptoms and one without. So the values listed above were the result of a patient getting myocartitis, but he would only be listed if all of the following boxes were checked, as it were:
    1. Patient developed myocarditis after vaccination.
    2. Patient actually developed clear clinical signs associated with myocarditis.
    3. Doctor correctly diagnosed myocarditis – it is very easily misdiagnosed or ignored in young healthy people without any history of heart issues.
    4. Dr. knew to consider myocarditis as a possible consequence of vaccination – recall pre-June 2021 myocariditis was not associated with the ‘safe’ vaccines.
    5. Doctor did not consider the myocarditis as being related or misdiagnosed as some other heart ailment.
    6. Doctor actually ordered the very expensive diagnostic approach of ordering the CMR(heart MRI) or a heart biopsy – both of these are very expensive and require special equipment and training to conduct, ie very possible many would not pursue these steps and simply treat the patient and watch for resolution of the symptoms.
    7. The hospital billing codes were correctly noted – this is a very big ‘if’ as a study demonstrate last fall that there are a great variety of codes used by hospitals and only cases with very specific codes would be included in the research in this paper – a common problem with all of these retrospective studies.
    8. Doctor took the 30+ minutes out of his busy day to actually record the diagnosis in VAERS.
    [This is likely not an exhastive list]
    If any one of these steps was skipped following the development of myocarditis, this study would not include the case in the above calculations.
    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

    It should be noted that the elderly >50 have pre-existing heart disease and clincal signs of vaccine induced myocarditis could easily be attributed to these other heart diseases. So, the doctor would not consider or report it as a vaccine injury.

    Dr. Johnson suggested that heart biopsies are not done, but in fact, heart biopsies are the gold standard of diagnosis of myocarditis, and only recently has the CMR been added to

  3. From February 8 Arutz Sheva:

    Cure for long COVID? Antihistamines shown to provide huge relief
    Case study shows over 90 percent restoration of daily function after taking cheap & readily available OTC medication.

    08.02.22 17:51
    Two case reports recently published in The Journal for Nurse Practitioners by students at the University of California, Irvine, suggest that cheap and readily available antihistamine drugs could provide immense relief to people suffering from what is commonly referred to as “long COVID.”

    Long COVID is clinically known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 and includes symptoms such as brain fog, joint pain, intolerance of exercise, and fatigue, which can last for months following COVID infection.

    “Patients tell us they wish more than anything that they could work and do the most basic activities they used to before they got sick with long COVID. They are desperately searching for something to help them get back on their feet,” said the report’s corresponding author, Melissa Pinto, UCI associate professor of nursing. “Currently, there is no cure for PASC, only symptom management. A number of options are being tried, with antihistamines being one of them. The possibility that an easy-to-access, over-the-counter medication could ease some of the PASC symptoms should offer hope to the estimated 54 million people worldwide who have been in distress for months or even years.”

    The reports describe the experiences of two previously healthy and active middle-aged women who found serendipitous relief for their long COVID symptoms after using antihistamine drugs to treat other unrelated symptoms. Almost a year later, they are still experiencing the benefits of the antihistamine medication.

    The first woman took antihistamine over-the-counter medication to treat a dairy allergy; the other took the drug instead of another medication that she had run out of. Both reported improved cognition and far less fatigue.

    In the first case, the woman consulted her physician who prescribed an antihistamine to be used daily; she now reports having regained 90 percent of her pre-COVID daily function. The second woman reported similar results and estimates that she has regained 95 percent of her pre-infection daily function.

    Prof. Pinto told Newswise that, “Most patients tell us that providers have not recommended anything that has helped. If patients wish to try OTC antihistamines, I urge them to do so under medical supervision. And because providers may not know about new potential treatments, I would encourage patients to be active in their care and consider taking research and case reports like ours to appointments with providers so they can help create a regimen that will work. The next steps for this research into antihistamine treatment are to conduct broad-based trials in order to evaluate efficacy and to develop dosage schedules for clinical practice guidelines.”

  4. Everyone should watch Dr. John Campbell’s video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb1Xm1uaedU.

    In it Campbell refers to a study published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) which shows that myocarditis cases as reported to VAERS are 133 times more for vaccinated individuals than for unvaccinated individuals. Since as Dr. Campbell points out, the VAERS system reports only a small number of actual cases for any disease that may be associeted with a vaccine, the actual number of cases must be much higher than 133 times the number of cases of vaccinated than of unvaccinated people. And since most cases of myocarditis occur in people under the age of thirty, the number of case of myocarditis among vaccinated individuals in this group this age group must be even many times more than among individual in this age group who have not been vaccinated.

    Dr. Campbell says this article in the JAMA has also been the subject of a recent article in INN. But it has not been reported in the mainstream media.

    If Dr. Campbell’s summary of the JAMA article is correct, then the rick of myocarditis in younger adults sand children is probably many thousand of times higher if they have been vaccinated thean if the were not vaccinated. Clearly vaccinating people in these age groups, and/or encouraging or compelling them to be vaccinated, should beprosecuted as voluntary manslaghter of a mass scale. Likewis the failure of the CDC to warn people in this age group and their parents of the severe risks of vaccination.

    Peloni, please listen to the video, read the INN article and the original article in JAMA, and report back to us what you think.