COVID-19 symptoms: Increased risks for 3 years after infection [Video]

COVID-19 could be a powerful risk factor for heart attacks and strokes for as long as three years after an infection, a large new study suggests.

The study was published Wednesday in the medical journal Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. It relied on medical records from roughly a quarter of a million people who were enrolled in a large database called the U.K. Biobank.

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Within this dataset, researchers identified more than 11,000 people who had a positive lab test for COVID-19 documented in their medical records in 2020; nearly 3,000 of them had been hospitalized for their infections. They compared these groups with more than 222,000 others in the same database who didn’t have a history of COVID-19 over the same time frame.

People who caught COVID in 2020, before there were vaccines to …