Instances of death from myocardial infarctions, better known as heart attacks, jumped substantially in 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, causing some medical experts to question whether the virus or mRNA vaccines are more to blame.
The study, published by researchers with the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, found that young adults aged 25-44 experienced the steepest increase in adverse cardiac events.
Researchers analyzed over 1.5 million deaths resulting from heart attacks in the United States for a decade and found a significantly increased prevalence of fatal events that tracked with the rise of COVID-19 in 2020 but more significantly in 2021.
The first recorded person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 occurred in January 2020, and by March, then-president Donald Trump had declared the virus a national emergency.
The study found that from April 1, 2020, through March 31, 2021, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths attributed to heart attacks spiked about 14%, jumping from 143,787 to 164,096.
The second year of the pandemic saw “dramatic increases in heart attacks [that] blew apart the models used to predict how many people would lose their lives to these events.”
In that year, deaths from heart attacks among adults ages 25-44 soared nearly 30% over what these models predicted, while deaths from heart attacks climbed by almost 20% for adults ages 45-64 and roughly 14% for adults ages 65 and older.
“The dramatic rise in heart attacks during the pandemic has reversed what was a prior decadelong steady improvement in cardiac deaths … We are still learning the many ways by which COVID-19 affects the body, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or race,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Yee Hui Yeo, a physician-scientist at Cedars-Sinai.
Experts like Dr. Nancy Sicotte, chair of the Department of Neurology at Cedars-Sinai, suggested high-risk groups, including those with cardiovascular diseases, should consider vaccination against COVID-19 to mitigate these risks.
Still, there is concern within the medical community that available vaccines may actually increase the risk of fatal cardiac events.
Widespread availability and administration of COVID-19 vaccines for young and low-risk adults began in early 2021. Since then, studies on these vaccinations have uncovered an increased risk of several adverse cardiac events, particularly amongst young adults, such as myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias.
For example, as previously reported in The Dallas Express, a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics found myopericarditis, a complicated heart condition that can result in death, manifested as “an important adverse event” following mRNA injections in adolescents.
The two most common vaccines against COVID-19 both utilize mRNA technologies.
Another study looked at individuals aged 16 and older vaccinated for COVID-19 and found an increased risk of adverse cardiac events in the 28 days following the administration of the first dose of the vaccine. This risk increased following the administration of a second dose.
These findings were confirmed in an October 2022 analysis by the Florida Department of Health, which conducted its own study of the issue and “found that there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination.”
The results of their study have led the Florida surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, to recommend “against males aged 18 to 39 from receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”
“With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of vaccination is likely outweighed by this abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death among men in this age group,” Ladapo suggested in a statement.