An analysis published in the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology found women and people of racial and ethnic minority groups experienced a substantial worsening of their lipid profiles during the early stay-at-home orders brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stay-at-home orders drastically altered dietary and exercise patterns for most people and may have even affected medication access and use, says senior author and preventive cardiologist Sean P. Heffron, MD.
To understand whether these public health measures affected cardiovascular risk, Dr. Heffron and colleagues compared nonHDL cholesterol levels in blood samples collected before and after the strict stay-at-home order in New York City. As a control for seasonality, they performed an identical comparison for the same time periods one year prior.
Serial samples from more than 30,000 patients revealed a dramatic increase in nonHDL cholesterol levels (≥38 mg/dL), particularly among women and people from racial and ethnic minority groups.
“The pandemic and subsequent public health measures may have produced unintended negative consequences for already at-risk groups.”
Sean P. Heffron, MD
“The pandemic and subsequent public health measures may have produced unintended negative consequences for already at-risk groups—exacerbating disparities in cardiovascular health and serving to highlight the tenuous position of particular populations,” the authors concluded.
The results remained consistent even when the researchers restricted their analyses to people with unchanged lipid-lowering medication prescriptions across the observation periods. In total, more than half (55 percent) of the study population experienced increases in nonHDL-C levels during the stay-at-home order as compared to the same period in 2019.
