Heart attack cases in Hassan | Cardiologists divided on side-effects & corelation; await more data

Bengaluru: The recent deaths in Hassan has sparked a serious discussion on the correlation between Covid vaccine and sudden heart attacks among youngsters.

Even as the government has set up an expert committee to analyse the matter, cardiologists are divided in their views.

While a few believe that there is a need to study the data available before drawing such conclusions, a few others believe that such side effects were expected. The expert committee formed to analyse the correlation between the Covid vaccine and sudden deaths due to heart attack will collect details on the patients and their medical history and compare them with a study conducted between 2013-18.

Dr K S Ravindranath, director, Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, told DH that it was not easy to accurately determine the correlation between the two. 

“Over the years, risk factors among youngsters increased by nearly 70%. Now, many of them develop blood pressure and diabetes early on. Smoking has also increased. So, the risk of heart attack would have increased naturally,” he said.

However, to analyse the correlation between the two, the expert committee is collecting medical conditions of those who died of heart attack along with their Covid vaccination status. “We are also checking if they had contracted Covid. We will then compare it with the data available from the study that concluded in 2019, to analyse and see if we can draw any conclusions on the effect of the Covid vaccine,” Ravindranath said. 

While he did not completely rule out the side effects of Covid vaccine, he said it was important to check other factors before drawing such a conclusion.

Another cardiologist with a private hospital opined that many Covid patients had experienced heart attack during the pandemic and it was expected that a vaccine could lead to such side effects.

“Vaccines are nothing but inactivated or dead viruses. They can only do the things that the active virus can do. In the first few months of Covid-19, before the vaccines were developed, we were already seeing heart problems among Covid-19 patients. So we knew that the Covid vaccine was capable of causing heart attacks and strokes. It is not surprising. Every vaccine has side effects,” said Deepesh Venkataraman, a cardiologist.