While health experts continue to get information on the potential long-term effects caused by the coronavirus, scientists at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs found that the chances of developing heart disorders after recovering from COVID-19 were much higher in those who have been infected than those who never got the disease.

The study used national healthcare databases to construct a division of 153,760 people with COVID-19, along with 5,637,647 who did not get infected and 5,859,411 people who had their data collected prior to the pandemic in order to evaluate the risks of cardiovascular issues. The results showed that the risk of nearly two dozen heart conditions had increased in those who had COVID a year prior when compared with those who did not.

Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Larisa Tereshchenko said that “COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A limitation of the research, however, is that the general population of veterans tends to lean towards white males who are older in age, as the average age of the patients was in their 60s.

“COVID-19 can lead to serious cardiovascular complications and death,” co-author of the study Ziyad Al-Aly said in a statement. “What we’re seeing isn’t good. The heart does not regenerate or easily mend after heart damage.”

It also seems that the damage COVID causes long-term is not exclusively cardiovascular. Yale School of Medicine immunologist Akiko Iwasaki recently administered a study to deduce possible longstanding effects of the virus. Her research found that even those who experienced milder symptoms of COVID-19 can feasibly experience long-term neurological damage.

“Our most recent research was done mostly in [a] mouse model of COVID-19, where we intentionally gave mice a mild respiratory infection with SARS-CoV-2,” Iwasaki said. “We measured what happens in the brain seven days and seven weeks after the infection. And what we found is that even with a very mild infection ... we still saw some significant damage in the cells of the brain."

According to Our World in Data, around 400 million people worldwide have been infected with COVID since the start of the pandemic.

“Our findings highlight the serious long-term cardiovascular consequences of having a COVID-19 infection and emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated against COVID-19,” Al-Aly said. “These are diseases that will affect people for a lifetime.”

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