CVD-COVID-UK (COVID-19 and cardiovascular diseases)

People with cardiovascular disease are at increased risk of developing COVID-19 and of poor outcomes of COVID-19, such as admission to hospital or intensive care, or of dying. This could be due to cardiovascular conditions themselves (e.g., heart disease, stroke), their risk factors (e.g., age, raised blood pressure), medications, or combinations of these. Understanding which patients are affected and why will help in developing strategies to reduce this risk.

CVD-COVID-UK is a suite of projects uinder the auspices of Health Data Research UK (HDRUK), which aims to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and blood clots in the lungs through analyses of de-identified, linked, nationally collated healthcare datasets across the four nations of the UK.

University of Edinburgh researchers are leading project CCU-002, and are collaborating across the other studies. CCU-002 is entitled 'SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of venous thromboembolism and arterial thrombotic events'.

In this project, the team will use healthcare records to study every person alive in England, Scotland and Wales at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. They will find out how many people had a stroke, heart attack, heart condition or other disease of the blood vessels over the following year. 

They will then compare the number of people with COVID-19 infection who developed a blood vessel disease with the number of people without COVID-19 infection who developed a blood vessel disease. Different types of people might have different risks, so they will examine people of different ages, ethnicities and medical history.

In light of the reports of blood-clotting complications after coronavirus vaccination, the team will also examine the risks for clotting events of different types, for different vaccines, for people who have had one or two vaccine doses, and for people with different characteristics.

The result of this research will be an estimate of how much COVID-19 increases the risk of different blood vessel diseases. This information is needed so that people with COVID-19 know whether they need to worry about blood vessel diseases as they recover. If this research shows there is an increased risk, then treatments might be needed to reduce this.