Getting to the Heart of COVID-19 Effects
Coronavirus may cause a respiratory disease, but the damage it does isn’t limited to the lungs. The American Heart Association released data showing that inflammation of the vascular system and injury to the heart are common effects of COVID-19. These effects contribute to 40 percent of coronavirus deaths.
“Much remains to be learned about COVID-19 infection and the heart,” said Mitchell Elkind, M.D., president of the American Heart Association (AHA). “Although we think of the lungs being the primary target, there are frequent biomarker elevations noted in infected patients that are usually associated with acute heart injury. Moreover, several devastating complications of COVID-19 are cardiac in nature and may result in lingering cardiac dysfunction beyond the course of the viral illness itself.”
Age, diabetes and chronic pulmonary disease are widely recognized as mortality risk factors. Heart damage has not received as much attention, despite 23 percent of people hospitalized for COVID-19 having cardiovascular complications. In one study of 100 people who recovered from COVID-19, nearly 80 percent had cardiac abnormalities that were unrelated to the severity of coronavirus symptoms.
Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.