Big study reveals increased heart disease and diabetes risk after COVID-19

Alongside the acute challenges of COVID-19 and the distinct persistent condition of long COVID, researchers are increasingly seeing that recovered patients suffer higher rates of stroke, diabetes and heart disease in the months following an infection. But the long-term outcomes from COVID-19 are still unclear. One of the largest longitudinal studies on the subject was published earlier this year. From Washington University, around 150,000 COVID cases were followed for up to 12 months. Those subjects were 55 percent more likely to experience a serious cardiovascular event in the year after recovering. This new research, led by a team from King’s College London, looked at health records from 428,650 COVID-19 patients in the United Kingdom. Each patient was demographically matched against a control patient and two specific health outcomes were tracked in the 12 months following COVID infection: new diagnoses of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The new study was published in PLOS Medicine.