2023-12-18 21:47:00
MONDAY, Dec. 18, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Add another post-COVID danger to the list: Research suggests having the disease might increase the risks of dangerous irregular heartbeats.
According to Swedish researchers, a person’s chances of developing atrial fibrillation (a common arrhythmia linked to stroke) increased 12 times in the month following a COVID infection, compared to people without the disease. The risk remained elevated for at least two months, they added.
Age and severity of COVID seemed to be key.
“We found that risks were highest in older individuals, in individuals with severe COVID-19, and during the first wave of the pandemic,” said researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Fors Connolly. She heads the research group at Umeå University.
“We were also able to see that unvaccinated people were at higher risk than vaccinated people,” he added in a university news release. “Overall, the severity of the infection was the strongest risk factor.”
In their study, Connolly and his collaborators analyzed data from more than 1 million Swedes who were infected with COVID through May 2021.
They compared the health data of those individuals with that of 4 million Swedes who had not been infected with COVID.
In addition to the sharply increased risk of atrial fibrillation, the team also found that having had an episode of COVID-19 increased the odds of another dangerous arrhythmia, paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, for six months.
There was also a five-fold increased risk of developing this irregular heartbeat within a month of infection with the COVID virus, the research showed.
The risks of another class of irregular heartbeats, called bradyarrhythmias, tripled in the month following COVID, the study also found.
All of these findings “underscore the importance of getting vaccinated once morest COVID-19 and for the health care system to identify people at higher risk for these types of complications, so that the correct diagnosis is made and treatment begins.” appropriate treatment in time,” said the study’s first author, Dr. Ioannis Katsoularis, a cardiologist at the University Hospital of Northern Sweden in Umeå.
The study appears in a recent issue of the European Heart Journal.
More information
Learn more regarding cardiac arrhythmias at Mayo Clinic.
SOURCE: Umeå University, press release, December 13, 2023
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