The results are the latter of a surveillance program called atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC), which recruited thousands of people around the age of 54 in the late 1980s in the Minneapolis region and three other American sites . The researchers followed them two to three decades later to see how their health changed.
Over three decades, about 1 in 4 people in the surveillance program underwent episodes of heart failure. The risk was more than twice more likely in patients who, at some point, had been hospitalized for infections, according to the latest study by the Demmer group, published Thursday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The risks were the highest after blood and respiratory infections, but were also significant for skin infections and urinary tract. Digestive infections were only weakly correlated with heart failure later in life.
Heart failure can cause cardiac arrest or damage the kidney and liver. Treatments range from drugs to increase blood flow to surgeries, including the implantation of cardiac stimulators or eliminate obstructions from blood vessels.
The establishment of a cause and precise effect relationship between infections and heart failure will be difficult, as researchers cannot refuse preventive care to patients just to see if it increases their risks, said Demmer. “It would be contrary to ethics, for example, to say that we want to randomize people to receive or not receive the influenza vaccine.”
