A severe COVID infection can increase a person’s risk of heart attack and stroke as much as a history of heart disease, a new study says.

People hospitalized for COVID had about the same risk of a major cardiac event as people with heart disease who never had COVID, researchers found.

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Results also showed that any type of COVID infection — mild to severe — doubles the risk of a major cardiac event for up to three years following illness.

“These findings reveal while it’s an upper respiratory tract infection, COVID-19 has a variety of health implications and underscores that we should consider history of prior COVID-19 infection when formulating cardiovascular disease preventive plans and goals,” said co-senior researcher Dr. Stanley Hazen, chair of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences with the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute.

Early in the pandemic it became clear that COVID increases a person’s risk of blood clots and heart problems, but there remains a lack of understanding regarding how long this risk lasts and what factors influence it, researchers said.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from more than 10,000 COVID patients in the United Kingdom diagnosed between February and December 2020, and compared their heart health to nearly 218,000 people who weren’t infected with COVID.

The team found that COVID hospitalization is a “risk equivalent” to coronary artery disease.

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They also found that a person’s risk varies based on their blood type.

People with A, B and AB blood types had a higher risk of future heart problems following a severe COVID infection, compared to people with an O blood type, results show.

This suggests that a person’s genetics could play a role in their heart risk following a COVID infection, researchers said.

The findings were published Oct. 9 in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

“We’re trying to rule out other alternative explanations, but it looks like there’s really something biological going on with these specific blood groups,” said co-senior researcher Hooman Allayee, a professor of population and public health sciences and biochemistry and molecular medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

“Given our collective observations and that 60% of the world's population have these non-O blood types, our study raises important questions about whether more aggressive cardiovascular risk reduction efforts should be considered, possibly by taking into consideration an individual's genetic makeup,” Allayee added in a university news release.

Doctors now need to weigh COVID infection as part of patients’ overall heart risk, Allayee said.

“The question now is: Could this finding, along with subsequent studies, change international guidelines for preventive cardiac care, even in the absence of known heart disease?” Allayee said.