• Posted February 3, 2025

Severe Infections Double Risk of Heart Failure

Landing in the hospital with COVID or the flu can put your heart health at dire risk, a new study suggests.

Adults hospitalized for a severe infection are more than twice as likely to develop heart failure years later, according to findings published Jan. 30 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The results underscore the importance of getting recommended vaccines and protecting oneself during the cold and flu season, experts said.

“These are ‘sit-up and take notice’ findings,” Sean Coady, deputy branch chief of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, said in a news release.

“While there’s already a reasonable body of evidence linking previous infections with heart attack, this study is focused on heart failure, which has been less studied yet affects an estimated six million Americans,” added Coady, who was not involved in the study, which the National Institutes of Health funded.

For the study, researchers followed nearly 14,500 adults 45 to 64 for up to 31 years, from 1987 to 2018. None had heart failure when the study started.

People who wound up hospitalized due to an infection had a 2.35 times higher risk of developing heart failure, on average about seven years after their initial illness, results show.

The association with heart failure was consistent regardless of the type of infection that landed a person in the hospital. 

These included respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections and infections acquired while in the hospital for another condition, the study says.

In particular, severe infections tripled the risk of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), which occurs when the left side of the heart is too stiff to fully relax between heartbeats.

HFpEF is the most common form of heart failure among seniors over 65, and the one with the most limited treatment options, researchers noted.

Nearly half of the study participants experienced an infection-related hospitalization, emphasizing the huge impact that infectious diseases might have on America’s heart health, researchers said.

Even though the study couldn’t prove a cause-and-effect link between severe infections and heart failure, the results indicate that people should still consider common sense ways to keep severe infections at bay, senior researcher Ryan Demmer, a professor of epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said in a news release.

In particular, people at high risk for heart disease who experience a severe infection should talk with their doctor and make sure they’re doing everything they can to protect their heart health, Demmer said.

Future research should focus on solidifying the link between infections and heart failure, he added.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on infection and heart health.

SOURCE: National Institutes of Health, news release, Jan. 30, 2025