A new study has come to the alarming conclusion that if you’re getting knee or hip joint replacement surgery, your risk of heart attack jumps immediately after the operation.

However, once you are past this initial post-surgery situation, your risk of heart attack returns to normal, the study found according to a Business Standard report.

Still, the risk of a blood clot in the veins or the lungs may stick around years after the operation.

It’s the first study to provide evidence from the general population that osteoarthritis patients who have a total knee or hip replacement surgery face a heart attack risk in the immediate psot-operative periods, Yuqing Zhang, a professor at Boston University School of Medicine and the lead author on the report, said according to the report.

In the case of osteoarthritis, which is the most common form of arthritis, joint cartilage and bone begins to deteriorate, necessitating surgery to replace a knee or hip to relieve the pain and allow the patient to better move again.

About 1.8 million anthroplasty surgeries are performed every year around the world, and it gets all the more common as the population gets older.

This latest study included 13,849 patients who had undergone this surgery, matching them up with an equal number of people who did not have the surgery. All of the patients were at least 50 years old had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis between 2000 and 2012.

A total of 306 patients in the anthroplasty group had a heart attack in the follow-up period, compared to 286 in the control group. The risk was highest in the month after the operation.