COVID-19 Can Cause New Cholesterol Problems. What to Know

Time Magazine Not long after the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, it was apparent that many people infected with SARS-CoV-2 were developing persistent and, in some cases, debilitating health problems. Now known widely as post-Covid syndrome or Long COVID, the most common symptoms of this condition are fatigue, attention problems, headaches, muscle or joint pain, and weakness. But those are just the start. Medical researchers have also linked SARS-CoV-2 to lingering complications in multiple organs and systems, and some recent work has found that new-onset cholesterol problems may be an under-recognized but common complication of COVID-19. “We’ve been doing research on the long-term consequences of infection, and we see a lot of patients come in with fatigue, brain fog, and the other symptoms most people associate with Long COVID,” says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and Chief of the Research and Development Service at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System. “But we’ve also seen people who have never had any metabolic problems develop new-onset diabetes or hyperlipidemia, and so we decided to take a scientific and systematic look at the metabolic consequences of infection.”In a study appearing in the January 2023 issue of the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, Al-Aly and colleagues examined the health records of more than 150,000 users of the VA health system. They found that unvaccinated people who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 were significantly more likely to develop high cholesterol and other unhealthy levels of blood fats than people who had not been infected. “What we found was a very clear signal that people who had had COVID-19 had a higher risk of cholesterol problems that included higher LDL, higher total cholesterol, higher triglycerides, and lower levels of so-called good cholesterol,” he says. “And these were all new events, meaning they were showing up in people who had no history of cholesterol problems.”

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