Hospitalization for infection associated with increased cardiovascular disease event risk
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Infections severe enough to require hospitalization were associated with increased risk for major cardiovascular disease events.
- The risk was most pronounced immediately after hospitalization.
Infections that require hospital treatment were associated with increased risk for major cardiovascular disease events immediately after hospitalization, with a small increased risk in the long term, researchers reported.
“Our findings indicate a substantially increased short-term risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events immediately after severe infections,” Pyry N. Sipilä, MD, PhD, researcher in the department of public health at the University of Helsinki, and colleagues wrote in Circulation. “We also observed a modest long-term excess risk of these events, but residual confounding cannot be excluded.”
Image: Adobe Stock
Using data from 331,683 UK Biobank participants without CVD at baseline, the researchers replicated the main findings of an independent population of 271,533 participants from Finland.
In the UK Biobank, 54,434 participants were hospitalized for an infection and 11,649 had an incident major CV event at a mean follow-up of 11.6 years, the researchers wrote. Participants with no record of infectious disease were less likely to experience major CV events than those who were hospitalized, regardless of the subtype of infection.
The researchers found that this association persisted during the entire follow-up (HR = 1.47; 95% CI, 1.4-1.54), but the association was strongest within the first month after infection (HR = 7.87; 95% CI, 6.36-9.73). The replication cohort yielded similar results during the first month (HR = 7.64; 95% CI, 5.82-10.03) and during the mean follow-up of 19.2 years (HR = 1.41; 95% CI, 1.34-1.48).
After they controlled for traditional CV risk factors, the researchers estimated the population-attributable fraction of severe infections and major CV events was 4.4% in the UK Biobank cohort and 6.1% in the replication cohort.
“Clinicians should be aware that people hospitalized for an infection may have an elevated short-term risk of major cardiovascular disease events,” Sipilä and colleagues wrote.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts