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COVID-19 is known to cause severe damage to the lungs, but new studies indicate that it can also deeply damage the heart.
COVID-19 is known to cause severe damage to the lungs, but new studies indicate that it can also deeply damage the heart.
Photo: Peter Dazeley / Getty Images
COVID-19 is known to cause severe damage to the lungs, but new studies indicate that it can also deeply damage the heart.
COVID-19 is known to cause severe damage to the lungs, but new studies indicate that it can also deeply damage the heart.
Photo: Peter Dazeley / Getty Images
In the early stages of the pandemic, doctors and scientists focused on how COVID-19, an acute respiratory illness, attacks the lungs. Two new studies in Germany suggest that even if patients escape hospitalization, the virus can harm the heart.
It is too early to determine whether the damage is permanent, but the findings are not encouraging.
The first study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology, examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 relatively young patients who had recovered from COVID-19 and compared them to the MRIs of 100 similar people who had not contracted the disease. . Two thirds of the patients recovered at home.
Two months after their recovery, 78 infected patients were found to have structural changes in their hearts. A biomarker indicating a myocardial injury similar to that occurring in heart attacks was found in 76 patients. Sixty patients suffered inflammation of the heart.
The average age of the infected patients was 49 years. Neither had previous heart problems or other pre-existing conditions; in fact, many were skiers returning from vacation.
The second study, also published in JAMA Cardiology on Monday, examined autopsy reports of 39 people, aged 78 to 89, who died in April. Analysis of heart tissue revealed that the virus had infiltrated the hearts of 24 of the patients.
The study results appear to validate concerns expressed earlier this month by John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccination at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program.
“There is now evidence that the virus can directly attack heart muscle cells, and there is also evidence that the cytokine storm that the virus triggers in the body not only damages the lungs, but can also damage the heart,” he said. Swartzberg to Berkeley News. “We don’t know what the long-term effects of that are, but it could be that we will have a population of people who survive COVID-19 only to continue and have chronic heart problems.”
Those problems include chronic heart failure, a progressive disease in which the heart slowly becomes less able to pump blood throughout the body.
Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez, 27, confirmed Sunday that he suffered from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, attributed to his coronavirus infection earlier this summer. Rodríguez had been cleared to shoot after testing negative, but the new diagnosis left him out.
Symptoms of myocarditis, according to the Mayo Clinic, include disruption of the heart muscle and your heart’s electrical system, reducing your heart’s pumping ability and causing fast or abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias). The condition can lead to heart failure.
The Boston Globe statistical news was a source for this article.
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Mike Moffitt is a reporter for SFGATE. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate
