A diagnosis of long COVID is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, particularly cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure, and coronary artery disease, even among patients who were not hospitalized for COVID-19, according to a new prospective cohort study published in eClinicalMedicine.
For the study, a team led by researchers from the Karolinska Institutet looked at data from a population-based health registry in the Stockholm, Sweden, region. They identified adults aged 18 to 65 years who had a diagnosis of long COVID (but had not been hospitalized for acute COVID) and no pre-existing cardiovascular disease from October 2020 to January 2025. Of the roughly 1.2 million people in the registry, around 9,000 (0.7%) had been diagnosed as having long COVID; two-thirds of them were women. {read}