Reduced risk of heart attack if you are infected

By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Feb. 20, 2023 (HealthDay News) — An injection of COVID-19 can protect a person against more than the virus alone, new research shows.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have linked vaccination with fewer heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems in people who later contracted COVID-19.

The investigators described their study as the first to examine both full and partial vaccination and the link to major adverse cardiac events (MACE) in the United States. It confirmed similar scans done using Korea’s COVID-19 registry.

For the study, the researchers used data from a national database of more than 1.9 million COVID-19 patients. Nearly 218,000 had received mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna or viral vector technology from Johnson & Johnson.

“We sought to clarify the impact of prior vaccination on cardiovascular events in people who develop COVID-19 and found that, particularly among people with comorbidities, such as a history of MACE, diabetes type 2, hypercholesterolemia, liver disease and obesity, there is an association with a lower risk of complications,” said the study’s lead author. Dr. Girish Nadkarni. He is Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School and Director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine.

“While we cannot attribute causation, this is supporting evidence that vaccination may have beneficial effects on a variety of post-COVID-19 complications,” Nadkarni said in a press release from the Mount Sinai.

The results of the study were published on February 20 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The research is also to be presented in New Orleans on March 5 at a joint conference of the American College of Cardiology and the World Heart Federation.

“To our surprise, even partial vaccination was associated with a lower risk of adverse cardiovascular events,” said the study’s first author. Joy Jiang, MD/PhD candidate in the Nadkarni laboratory. “Given the scale of SARS-CoV-2 infection worldwide, we hope that our findings can help improve vaccination rates, especially in people with coexisting conditions.”

SOURCE: Mount Sinai School of Medicine, news release, February 20, 2023

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