About a quarter of people over the age of 50 with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) experienced acute cardiac events, according to a new study. Furthermore, the risk for severe outcomes in those who had the virus were higher in people who had the cardiac events, the report stated.
Specifically, 22% of people over 50 hospitalized with RSV had acute cardiac events. Of the people, 59.6% were female and 40.4% were male. In total, 16% had heart failure, which was the most common cardiac event. Other cardiac events included ventricular tachycardia, hypertensive crisis, cardiogenic shock and acute myocarditis.
The report, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that 8.5% of the adults didn’t have any underlying cardiovascular disease. The risk for severe outcomes from RSV was twice as high in people who had acute cardiac events compared to those who didn’t; 33% of people with underlying cardiovascular disease had the cardiac events and 9% with underlying disease didn’t have cardiac events.
Data came from 6,248 older adults over the age of 50 who had RSV. It spanned people from 12 states over the course of five RSV seasons from 2014-2015 through 2017-2018 and 2022-2023.
Among all hospitalized adults with RSV infection, 18.6% had to go into intensive care and 4.9% died.
The study aligns with previous research that found heart failure, coronary events and atrial fibrillation occur frequently in adults who are hospitalized with acute respiratory infections including the flu and SARS-CoV-2, the authors noted.
“Acute cardiac events contribute substantially to the burden of RSV disease; whether RSV vaccination can prevent these complications is an important question as the impact of these vaccines is evaluated,” the authors wrote.
Last year, the first two RSV vaccines were approved for people over the age of 60. But the amount of older adults taking the RSV vaccine has been low, especially compared to older adults who get their flu shot, Tracy Wang, MD, a researcher at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute in Washington, D.C., and an associate editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, wrote in an editorial that went with the study.
“Prior RSV-related efforts have focused on infants and young children, with many clinicians and patients still unaware of RSV burden of disease and prognosis in older adults,” Wang wrote.
