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 say they have long-term covid, in which they experience signs and symptoms for four weeks or more after the initial phase of the infection.
In an effort to quantify what long covid means now and could mean in the future for these patients, Intermountain Health researchers have studied nearly 150,000 patients looking for cardiovascular symptoms and found that patients who tested positive had higher rates of chest pain in the six months to a year after infection.
chest pain
“Many patients with COVID-19 experience symptoms well beyond the acute phase of the infection,” says Heidi T. May, M.D., Cardiovascular Epidemiology at Intermountain Health and the study’s principal investigator. “Although we do not observe significant rates of major events such as myocardial infarction or stroke In patients with 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 2023 American College of Cardiology Scientific Conference, researchers compared three groups of patients from Intermountain Health. 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 patients of approximately the same age and sex, seen in the same months, as those who tested positive for COVID-19 and in third place 148,158 patients seen between January 1, 2018 and August 31, 2019, as a historical control, to 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. higher rates of experiencing chest painbut did not observe 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. “Could it be that the lasting effects of 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.