Cardiologists worried: COVID-19 seriously affects the human heart

New evidence suggests that SARS associated with COVID-19 can seriously affect heart function. We are talking about "potential long-term injury" in a patient who has had a coronavirus. The edition writes about it USA Today.

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German scientists conducted two studies, the results of which were published on July 28 in the journal JAMA Cardiology. They discovered cardiac abnormalities in COVID-19 patients months after they recovered from SARS-CoV-2 disease.

The first study included 100 patients from the University Hospital Registry of Frankfurt who were relatively healthy people in their 40s and 50s. About a third of the patients required hospitalization, the rest recovered at home.

The researchers looked at cardiac magnetic resonance imaging scans taken nearly two and a half months after these people were diagnosed and compared them with images from those who had never been infected with COVID-19. Thus, researchers discovered disturbances in the functioning of the heart in 78 patients, 60 of whom showed signs of inflammation of the heart muscle. "When this came to our attention, we were amazed," said Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and editor of JAMA Cardiology.

This study turned out to be very important, as most of the patients did not have any symptoms of the virus. With the help of MRI, scientists were able to identify specific abnormalities in patients that would not have been shown by an echocardiogram. The latter is more widely used in standard clinical settings.

Dr. Thomas Maddox, chair of the Science and Quality Committee of the American College of Cardiology, says that inflammation of the heart can weaken the heart muscle and, in rare cases, lead to abnormal heartbeats.

Yancey said inflammation is the first prerequisite for heart failure and, over a longer period of time, can leave serious damage that could "set the script" for other forms of heart disease. “We're not saying COVID-19 causes heart failure... but it does provide early evidence that heart damage is possible,” Yancey explained.

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Maddox says the study is contributing to the understanding that heart damage in COVID-19 patients may be a "side effect" of a general inflammatory response to the virus, rather than a direct viral invasion of the heart.

Although inflammation is a sign of COVID-19, Dr. Paul Cremer, a cardiovascular imaging specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, says doing imaging before patients got sick could have strengthened the study's argument that the disease could cause these cardiac abnormalities. “Seeing inflammation in the heart muscle... it’s hard to think about other causes besides COVID-19. But I am convinced: this should be confirmed in other studies,” the cardiologist is convinced.

The results of the study come after the Cleveland Clinic published on July 9 in the medical journal JAMA Network Open a number of cases of "broken heart syndrome", or stress-induced cardiomyopathy, doubled during the pandemic.

Stress cardiomyopathy occurs in response to physical or emotional distress and causes dysfunction or failure of the heart muscle. Experts say more research is needed to understand the long-term effects on the heart. “We need to understand the longer-term clinical symptoms and outcomes that may occur in patients who survive this and recover,” Maddox said. “It will take some time to understand how more and more people are getting sick and getting better.”

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