Coronavirus infection (‘COVID’) also known as COVID-19, might increase the chance of having a stroke, heart attack or clots in the deep leg veins or lungs (‘blood vessel diseases’).

During the COVID pandemic, some doctors saw patients who had COVID who also had unusual strokes, clots or heart complaints. This suggested a link between COVID and blood vessel diseases. But no individual doctor saw enough patients to find out if COVID really did increase the risk of blood vessel diseases.

We will study every person alive in NHS England, Scotland and Wales at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. We will find out how many people had a stroke, heart or other diseases of the blood vessels until the date we begin the analysis.

We will compare the number of people with COVID infection who had a blood vessel disease with the number of people without COVID infection who had a blood vessel disease. Different types of people might have different risks, so we will look at people of different ages, ethnicities and medical history as well. The result will be an estimate of how much COVID increases the risk of different blood vessel diseases.

This information is needed so that people with COVID know whether they need to worry about blood vessel diseases as they recover. If there is an increased risk, then preventative treatments might be needed.

Knight R, Walker V, Ip S, Cooper JA, Bolton T, Keene S, Denholm R, Akbari A, Abbasizanjani H, Torabi F, Omigie E, Hollings S, North TL, Toms R, Jiang X, Angelantonio ED, Denaxas S, Thygesen JH, Tomlinson C, Bray B, Smith CJ, Barber M, Khunti K, Davey Smith G, Chaturvedi N, Sudlow C, Whiteley WN, Wood AM, Sterne JAC; CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Consortium and the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing COVID-19 National Core Study. Association of COVID-19 With Major Arterial and Venous Thrombotic Diseases: A Population-Wide Cohort Study of 48 Million Adults in England and Wales. Circulation. 2022 Sep 20;146(12):892-906. doi: https://10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.060785

• Click here to view the analysis code used in NHS Digital's TRE for England.
• Click here to view the analysis code used in the SAIL Databank.
• Click here to view the code used outside of NHS Digital's TRE for England in order to prepare tables and figures for publication.
• Phenotyping algorithms and codelists used in NHS Digital's TRE for England are available here
• Phenotyping algorithms and codelists used in the SAIL Databank are available here

This is a sub-project of project CCU002 approved by the CVD-COVID-UK / COVID-IMPACT Approvals & Oversight Board (sub-project: CCU002_01).

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