Covid-19 seems to age blood vessels – but only among women
Women’s arteries seem to be stiffer if they have had covid-19, with the same effect not being found among men
By Luke Taylor
18 August 2025
Our arteries get stiffer with age, and covid-19 may not help
peterschreiber.media/Alamy
Covid-19 seems to accelerate the ageing of blood vessels, but perhaps only among women.
The infection has previously been linked to cardiovascular complications, like heart disease, but how it has this effect isn’t entirely clear. To learn more, Rosa Maria Bruno at the Université Paris Cité in France and her colleagues recruited 2390 people, aged 50 on average, from 16 countries – including the UK and US – between September 2020 and February 2022.
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Some of them had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, or had antibodies against it despite not being vaccinated, a sign that they had been infected. The others had only ever tested negative for the virus and had no signs of prior infection.
The health of their arteries was assessed by measuring how fast a pressure wave passed between the carotid artery in their neck and the femoral arteries in their legs. This is a measure of artery stiffness, which increases naturally with age, with less flexible arteries raising the risk of heart disease.
The researchers found that among the women in the study, a known SARS-CoV-2 infection was linked to stiffer arteries. This also seemed to increase alongside the severity of their infection. For instance, women who were hospitalised with covid-19 had a vascular age that was around five years older than their uninfected counterparts, rising to 7.5 years among those admitted to intensive care.
