Being infected by Covid can trigger chest pains for up to 12 months, warns a new study. It has already been established that even people with mild Covid-19 infections can suffer from health complications for several months.
Around one in five adults who had previously tested positive report having “Long Covid” - defined as experiencing signs and symptoms for four weeks or more after the initial phase of infection. In an effort to quantify what Long Covid means now, and could mean in the future, researchers at Intermountain Health in the United States examined more than 140,000 patients for cardiovascular symptoms.
They found that patients who tested positive for Covid had higher rates of chest pain both six months and a year after infection. Principal investigator Doctor Heidi May said: “Many Covid-19 patients experience symptoms well beyond the acute phase of infection.
“While we didn’t see any significant rates of major events like heart attack or stroke in patients who had an initial mild initial infection, we did find chest pains to be a persistent problem, which could be a sign of future cardiovascular complications.”
The research team found that at six months and one-year intervals, patients who tested positive for Covid had "significantly" higher rates of experiencing chest pain, but saw no other increases in cardiovascular events. Dr May a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Intermountain Health,said: “As of right now, the symptoms aren’t necessary translating into hard outcomes, but that’s something that will need to be reassessed over time."
She added “It could be that lasting effects of infection on the cardiovascular system are hard to quantify in terms of diagnoses or other events in the short-term and won’t be realized until longer follow up.” The findings were presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific conference in New Orleans on Sunday.
