Coronavirus infection (‘COVID-19’) or vaccination against coronavirus might increase a person’s chance of having a stroke, heart attack or clot in the deep veins or lungs (‘blood vessel diseases’).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some doctors have looked after patients with COVID-19 who also had unusual strokes, clots or heart complaints. This suggests there could be a link between COVID-19 and blood vessel diseases. But no individual doctor will see enough patients to find out if COVID-19 really does increase the risk of blood vessel diseases.
To understand more, we will use healthcare records to study every person alive in England, Scotland and Wales at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. We will find out how many people had a stroke, heart attack, heart condition or other disease of the blood vessels over the following year.
We will 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 we will also examine people of different ages, ethnicities and medical history.
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.
Following an urgent request for the MHRA and Chief Medical Officer, the analyses for this project will also address the urgent question on whether there is a causal association between the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and very rare blood clotting events, and Pfizer vaccine and myocarditis.
The issues outlined above will be addressed in outputs from a number of related sub-projects. Follow the links below to view repositories containing the protocol, data curation and analysis code, and phenotyping algorithms and codelists for each sub-project:
- CCU002_01: Association of COVID-19 with major arterial and venous thrombotic diseases: a population-wide cohort study of 48 million adults in England and Wales
- CCU002_02: Association of COVID-19 vaccines ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 with major venous, arterial, or thrombocytopenic events: A population-based cohort study of 46 million adults in England
- CCU002_03: Risk of myocarditis and pericarditis following BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 COVID-19 vaccinations
- CCU002_06: Cohort study of cardiovascular safety of different COVID-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England
Links to repositories for additional outputs will follow in due course.
This project has been approved by the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Approvals & Oversight Board (Project ID: CCU002).