Shafaq News / When it comes to developing high blood pressure, Covid-19 might play an outsized role, a new study says.

The report, published Monday in the medical journal Hypertension, found that more than 1 in 5 patients who were hospitalized with Covid-19 – and over 1 in 10 who were not – had been diagnosed with high blood pressure six months later. Compared with people who had influenza, another upper respiratory virus, those hospitalized with Covid-19 were over twice as likely to develop hypertension.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, the leading causes of death in the United States. Nearly half of the adults in the nation have hypertension, and in 2021, the CDC says, it caused nearly 700,000 deaths in the United States.

The threshold for hypertension can sometimes vary by doctor, but the most recent guidelines from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology define it as a reading of 130 over 90.

In the new study, the researchers looked at the medical records of over 45,000 Covid-19 patients and nearly 14,000 influenza patients in the Bronx borough of New York City between 2020 and 2022. Before their viral infection, none of the patients had a history of hypertension. At a six-month follow-up appointment, the researchers then tracked which ones had new diagnoses of the heart condition.

(CNN)