LOS ANGELES — Get a flu shot to ward off a case of influenza, and as an added bonus you’ll reduce your risk of a heart attack, stroke or other unpleasant “cardiovascular event,” a new study finds.
For some time, researchers have suspected that flu shots can protect heart health as well as respiratory health. They have tested this theory in a handful of clinical trials, and the results have been mixed.
Now an international group of researchers has compiled data from a dozen peer-reviewed randomized clinical trials to see if they could get a clearer answer to the question. What they found was “a consistent association between influenza vaccination and a lower risk of cardiovascular events,” according to their report in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Five of the trials the team examined compared a flu vaccine to a placebo vaccine or other type of control. In those trials, 3,238 patients got a real vaccine and 95 of them — 2.9 percent — went on to experience “a major adverse cardiovascular event,” the JAMA report said. For the sake of comparison, 3,231 patients in those trials got a placebo or control and 151 of them — or 4.7 percent — later had a cardiovascular event, according to the study.
