Cases of heart attacks and strokes among healthy, young and middle-aged Indians are becoming prevalent, a survey by LocalCircles, a community social media platform, has revealed. And these growing medical conditions are impacting both the vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

As many as 51% of people have one or more individuals in their close network who have experienced heart or brain stroke, blood clots, neurological complications, cancer acceleration or other sudden medical conditions in the last two years, the survey said.

The percentage of those knowing one or more individuals with sudden severe ailments or complications rose from 31% to 51% within a year, the study found.

A total of 62% of the people in their close network experiencing such severe conditions were double dose vaccinated; 11% were single dose vaccinated while 8% were unvaccinated, the study added.

Interestingly, 61% of the people in their close network experiencing severe medical conditions had experienced Covid once or more while 28% said their contacts with such severe conditions did not have Covid, pointed out the survey, which received over 32,000 responses from citizens located in 357 districts of India.

Over 200 million people worldwide may currently be having long Covid condition where they are experiencing myocarditis, pericarditis, brain fog or memory issues, sleep apnea, fatigue, joint pain and other health conditions, according to researchers.

In the last three months, many healthy, young and middle-aged individuals, both men and women, have experienced a heart attack and died. In several of these cases, the individual was engaged in some physical activity like dance, gym, walking etc. when they experienced cardiac arrest. What is driving such sudden deaths?

“Stroke has been seen as a manifestation of Covid-19 in various studies showing that 0.9% to 23% of Covid-19 patients developed stroke,” stated Bengaluru-headquartered Narayana Health. Based on its study of Covid-19 impact, Narayana Health in a blog post stated stroke can manifest in severely affected Covid-19 patients who initially develop Covid-19 symptoms and later on develop stroke as a multi-organ involvement. Few studies have shown that some patients present with stroke as an initial manifestation and later on are found to have Covid-19; these are young patients without risk factors for brain stroke.

Though the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare came out with a ‘National Comprehensive Guidelines for Management of post-Covid sequelae” for doctors last year, not much seems to have been done to inform citizens, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, who survived more than one bout of Covid or its variants, on possible complications and the need to avoid Covid reinfections, the survey underlined.

he government guidelines at the onset state “cardiovascular sequelae not only occur in symptomatic Covid-19 patients but have also been reported in asymptomatic patients. Up to 20%–30% of patients hospitalized with severe Covid-19 have evidence of myocardial involvement manifested by elevated troponin levels, venous thromboembolism, heart failure and arrhythmias”.

Sachin Taparia, founder of LocalCircles, said, “The need of the hour here is for the government to take extensive research on these severe medical conditions experienced by people and study this in the context of the impact of Covid by variant and the impact of vaccine by vaccine make and batch numbers. At the same time, the number of Covid infections experienced should also be considered. All of this will bring some clarity to the issue as to what are some of the root causes behind these severe medical conditions experienced by people. It will also enable us to get better prepared for what could be coming.”