News | Coronavirus (COVID-19) | September 07, 2022

Strict COVID Lockdowns in France Improved Cardiovascular Health

Graphical abstract During COVID19 total lockdown in 2020 in France, a significant reduction in vascular stiffness, recorded by home smart scales, was observed.© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society o f Cardiology.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any me

Graphical abstract During COVID19 total lockdown in 2020 in France, a significant reduction in vascular stiffness, recorded by home smart scales, was observed.© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society o f Cardiology.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. 


September 7, 2022 — A new paper in European Heart Journal - Digital Health, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that social-distancing measures like total lockdown have a measurable impact on vascular health. The study compared the impact on the health of people living in a partial vs. a total lockdown during the beginning of COVID-19.  

Nationwide total home confinement, lockdown, was the most striking measure taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection. Previous research has demonstrated that total lockdown resulted in a 54% reduction in physical activity. This, together with anxiety, financial stress, and difficulty securing appointments with doctors, might have hurt cardiovascular health. Lockdowns do, however, have some beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. The social distancing guidelines imposed on people around the world resulted in a reduction in air pollution and increased home cooking. People reduced their consumption of fast food and ready-made meals. People had less work-related stress and slept better. Lockdown has been applied heterogeneously by different countries, providing a unique opportunity to compare the impact of different social-distancing measures on cardiovascular health in a real-life experiment with a large population sample.  

Researchers here compared the cardiovascular health of people in France, which imposed strict limitations on peoples’ movements, including the shutdown of all non-essential production and commercial activities, to that of people in Germany, which adopted much less stringent social-distancing measures.  

Researchers here selected 53,043 people in France and Germany and tracked their health during the spring of 2020 when France’s lockdown began. Some 21.1% of French patients tracked during lockdown showed an overall improvement in cardiovascular health, with a reduction in vascular stiffness and body weight despite a concomitant reduction in physical activity. In France, the improvement in vascular age during lockdown corresponded to a reduction in vascular age of more than three years.   

The phenomenon was only modestly present in Germany, where lockdown was partial. The reduction in vascular stiffness was significantly steeper in French patients than in Germans. Vascular age reduction during lockdown was steeper in French than in German participants. French participants also showed a slight but greater weight reduction during lockdown than German participants.  

For more information: https://academic.oup.com/ 

Find more content from ESC22     

Related COVID Content:     

Myocarditis Risk Significantly Higher After COVID-19 Infection vs. After a COVID-19 Vaccine  

COVID-19 Fallout May Lead to More Cancer Deaths     

Kawasaki-like Inflammatory Disease Affects Children With COVID-19     

FDA Adds Myocarditis Warning to COVID mRNA Vaccine Clinician Fact Sheets     

CMS Now Requires COVID-19 Vaccinations for Healthcare Workers by January 4     

Cardiac MRI of Myocarditis After COVID-19 Vaccination in Adolescents     

Small Number of Patients Have Myocarditis-like Illness After COVID-19 Vaccination     

Overview of Myocarditis Cases Caused by the COVID-19 Vaccine     

Case Study Describes One of the First U.S. Cases of MIS-C     

NIH-funded Project Wants to Identify Children at Risk for MIS-C From COVID-19  


Related Content

News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

March 20, 2024 — SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can damage the heart even without directly infecting the ...

Home March 20, 2024
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

January 25, 2024 — New research confirms what public health leaders have been fearing: the significant uptick in the ...

Home January 25, 2024
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

January 11, 2024 — Acute cardiovascular manifestations of COVID-19, such as heart failure, thrombosis, and dysrhythmia ...

Home January 11, 2024
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

December 14, 2023 — Individuals infected with COVID-19 are also at an increased risk of suffering from heart rhythm ...

Home December 14, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

October 16, 2023 — A door-to-balloon (D2B) time of 90-minutes or less is associated with improved outcomes for heart ...

Home October 16, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

October 11, 2023 — Unvaccinated people who have recovered from COVID-19 are at heightened risk of heart complications ...

Home October 11, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

September 26, 2023 — New research from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai shows that patients who went to a ...

Home September 26, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

June 19, 2023 — Patients who had heart attacks during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK and Spain are predicted to ...

Home June 19, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

June 14, 2023 — A University of Waterloo engineer’s MRI invention reveals better than many existing imaging technologies ...

Home June 14, 2023
Home
News | Coronavirus (COVID-19)

June 9, 2023 — Patients infected with beta and delta COVID-19 variants, and those who required hospital stays for COVID ...

Home June 09, 2023
Home
Subscribe Now