Are flu shots good for the heart? New study links them to lower AFib risk, other key benefits
Flu vaccines protect the heart in more ways than one, according to new findings published in European Heart Journal.[1] The study’s authors reviewed years of data and linked flu vaccines to multiple benefits, including a reduced risk of atrial fibrillation (AFib).
“Beyond preventing respiratory illness, accumulating evidence indicates that influenza vaccination confers cardiovascular protection, with randomized trials and large observational studies demonstrating reductions in mortality and cardiovascular hospitalizations among high-risk populations, particularly those with heart failure or established cardiovascular disease,” wrote first author Laurent Fauchier, MD, PhD, a cardiologist with Trousseau University Hospital in Tours, France, and colleagues. “These findings have contributed to a paradigm shift, increasingly framing vaccination as a component of cardiovascular prevention rather than solely infectious disease control.”
To learn more, Fauchier et al. explored data from more than 1.1 million adult patients who had a routine healthcare visit in 2022. All data came from the TriNetX Global Collaborative Network. Propensity score matching was used to focus on two groups of approximately 138,000 patients—one group with a flu vaccine within the last year and one group without a flu vaccine.
After a mean follow-up period of 2.7 years, flu vaccines were associated with a significantly lower risk of AFib. The yearly rates AFib were 0.89% for vaccinated patients and 1.12% for nonvaccinated patients. Vaccinated patients were also linked to significantly lower risks of all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction and heart failure.
These benefits were consistent across different subgroups based on patient age and certain disease subgroups, the authors added.
“From a clinical perspective, these findings support consideration of influenza vaccination as part of comprehensive cardiovascular and AFib prevention strategies in routine care,” they wrote. “The absolute reduction in incident AFib observed in the present study was modest and, when considered in isolation, may appear limited at the individual level. However, influenza vaccination should not be viewed as a targeted intervention for AFib prevention alone, but rather as part of a broader cardiovascular prevention strategy. In this context, even modest relative risk reductions may translate into meaningful absolute benefits at the population level, given the high prevalence of AFib and the favorable safety of vaccination.”
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Michael has more than 19 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.