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By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19.
Heart attack, stroke risk increases in COVID-19 patients
COVID-19 increases patients’ risk of heart attack and stroke, suggests a Swedish study that compared 86,742 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 and 348,481 people without the virus. Within a week of being diagnosed with COVID-19, the risk of a first heart attack increased three to eight times, and the risk of a first stroke due to blocked blood vessels increased three to four times six, according to the researchers. find. The risks then declined steadily but remained elevated for at least four weeks, according to The Lancet report https://bit.ly/3yCe9Za. The researchers did not include COVID-19 patients who had had heart attacks or strokes in the past, but for them, the risk of another heart attack or stroke is likely even higher, a said co-author Dr Anne-Marie Fors Connolly of Umea University.
Less severe COVID-19 influenza vaccination
According to a report published Tuesday in PLoS One https://bit.ly/37nhLm7, influenza vaccination may reduce the risk of serious illness from coronavirus, including sepsis infections and life-threatening strokes . Researchers studied nearly 75,000 COVID-19 patients, half of whom had received the last available influenza vaccine. They also found that fewer flu-vaccinated patients had to be admitted to intensive care units or visit emergency departments, and fewer had dangerous blood clots in their legs, compared to patients who did not receive flu shot. Studies like this, however, cannot prove which flu shots caused the best results, or how they could have done so. Stronger, larger studies would help “validate these findings and determine whether increased emphasis on influenza vaccination will improve adverse outcomes in SARS-CoV-2 positive patients,” the authors wrote.
Revolutionary infections can strengthen immune defenses
Breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections in fully vaccinated people appear to boost their immune defenses, suggests a new study posted on medRxiv https://bit.ly/3jtLXBE ahead of peer review. A month after a COVID-19 outbreak at a German nursing home, doctors took blood samples from the 23 elderly residents and four staff who had tested positive. They found that vaccinated residents who still contracted the virus had significantly higher antibody levels afterwards than vaccinated residents who had not been infected, and that they also had more antibodies capable of neutralizing variants of the virus. Co-author Jorg Timm of Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf said the results suggest that it may come a time – after most people have developed some level of immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – where natural infection will have some benefit, but only when it does not result in serious symptoms or disease.
Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on vaccines in development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Linda Carroll; Editing by Tiffany Wu)
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