COVID-19 vaccination lowers risk of post-infection cardiovascular complications

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Key takeaways:

• Vaccination and boosting decreased risk of post-infection cardiovascular and cerebrovascular complications.
• Risks and burdens of subsequent complications increased for hospitalized patients.

People infected with COVID-19 have a higher risk of cardiovascular/cerebrovascular complications. However, researchers found that these risks can be reduced with vaccination and boosting.

“[This study] was prompted by evidence of heart complications in COVID-19 survivors in other countries and study settings (U.S., U.K., Denmark) but no evidence in highly vaccinated, Asian populations,” Jue Tao Lim, PhD, BSc, assistant professor in the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, told Healio.

Lim and colleagues conducted a cohort study using national testing and health care claims databases in Singapore to build a cohort of people with positive COVID-19 tests between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, 2021, during predominance of the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, while also creating a test-negative control group of people with no evidence of infection between April 13, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2022.

People in both groups were followed for an average of 300 days, during which the researchers estimated and reported risks for cardiovascular/cerebrovascular complications, according to the study.

In total, 106,012 infected cases and 1,684,085 test-negative controls were included in the study. Overall, people with COVID-19 had increased risk (HR = 1.157; 95% CI, 1.069-1.252) and excess burden (EB = 0.7; 95% CI, 0.53–0.88) of new-incident cardiovascular and cerebrovascular complications. These risks decreased among fully vaccinated (HR = 1.11; 95% CI, 1.02-1.22) and boosted (HR = 1.1; 95% CI, 0.92-1.32) patients.

The data also showed that risks and excess burdens increased for patients who were hospitalized compared with those who were not hospitalized. Specifically, the study showed that the risks of complications were increased in the hospitalized group for cerebrovascular complications (HR = 3.23; 95% CI, 1.47-7.11), dysrhythmias (HR = 2.67; 95% CI, 1.64-4.36) and ischemic heart disease (HR = 1.487; 95% CI, 1.05-2.11), as well as other cardiac disorders (HR = 2.63; 95% CI, 1.79-3.87) and other thrombotic complications (HR = 4.01; 95% CI, 2.03-7.91).

“Updates to vaccination, such as bivalent vaccines, and early treatment with therapeutics will potentially play a key role in mitigating the risks of long-term sequelae of post-SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Lim concluded.

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