Summary - From two studies published yesterday, out of 100 patients with an average age of 49, over half of the covid survivors, 2/3 of which were mild cases (recovered at home), have evidence of heart damage typical of a heart attack that persists after recovery. If these findings are confirmed in future studies, the finding is ominous because the heart is unable to regenerate heart tissue after the damage is done.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-lasting-heart-damage/ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768915 "Two new studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that Covid-19 takes on the heart, raising the specter of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalization"
"One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack"
"Marc Pfeffer, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, called both the autopsy and MRI studies a sobering warning. He was not involved in either. He's concerned about relatively young people losing their cardiac health reserves, which typically decrease with age and can set the stage for heart failure."
"We knew that this virus, SARS-CoV-2, doesn't spare the heart," he said. "We're going to get a lot of people through the acute phase [but] I think there's going to be a long-term price to pay."
"...if this high rate of risk is confirmed, the pathologic basis for progressive left ventricular dysfunction is validated, and especially if longitudinal assessment reveals new-onset heart failure in the recovery phase of COVID-19, then the crisis of COVID-19 will not abate but will instead shift to a new de novo incidence of heart failure and other chronic cardiovascular complications"
