Risk of POTS heart condition linked to COVID-19, study says

Dec. 12 (UPI) -- A new study has confirmed a link between COVID-19, and to a lesser degree the COVID-19 vaccine, and the heart condition postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS.

The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research, showed a link between patients diagnosed with long COVID -- and possibly those who received the COVID-19 vaccination -- and the debilitating heart condition POTS, which affects blood pressure and heart rate.

"The main message here is that while we see a potential link between COVID-19 vaccination and POTS, preventing COVID-19 through vaccination is still the best way to reduce your risk of developing POTS," said lead study author Dr. Alan Kwan, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

He said that a link between POTS and the vaccine needs to be confirmed with further studies.

POTS affects the involuntary nervous system, such as heart rate and blood pressure, usually after standing from a reclining position. Those who suffer from the heart condition often experience fainting and lightheadedness, along with rapid heart rate and low blood pressure.

The study analyzed nearly 300,000 patients from the Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles between 2020 and 2022, who had either had SARS-Cov-2 Infection or had been vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech.

While researchers found a small increased risk for POTS 90 days after vaccine exposure, they found the risk for POTS was five times greater for those who contracted COVID-19.

Researchers involved in the study, which focused on one health system, said getting a COVID-19 vaccine reduces your risk of complications from the virus, adding that the vaccine has been shown in multiple trials to be safe and effective.

'Vaccine pharmacovigilance has revealed diverse rare side effects in the setting of population-wide administration, including off-target cardiovascular effects, with the most well-characterized being myocarditis," said the study, which included some reports of cases of postural orthostatic tacticardia syndrome after vaccination.

Researchers say it is still not clear why COVID-19 vaccines could trigger POTS, but Kwan said it could be related to the immune response generated by the shots.

Both researchers and physicians, such as Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children's Hospital, say more studies are needed to examine the immune response to the vaccines.

"The better we understand how the adverse events work, the smarter we can become in designing better vaccines in the future," Levy said.