Cardiac injury among Covid-19 patients tied to higher risk of death - CNN - 0 views
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Heart injury could be a common condition in patients hospitalized with Covid-19, according to a new study that also shows it's linked to a greater risk of death among those patients.
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Cardiac injury, also referred to as myocardial injury, occurs when there is damage to the heart muscle, and such damage can occur when blood flow to the heart is reduced -- which is what causes a heart attack.
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"An elevated troponin doesn't always mean a heart attack but it does mean myocardial injury or heart damage," said Dr. Erin Michos, the associate director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study.
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The data also revealed that the death rate was higher among patients with cardiac injury versus those without: 42 of the patients with cardiac injury, or 51.2%, died versus 15 of those without, or 4.5%.
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Also, acute inflammatory responses due to an infection can lead to reduced blood flow in patients with preexisting cardiovascular diseases, the researchers noted. They wrote that "based on these lines of evidence, we hypothesize that an intense inflammatory response superimposed on preexisting cardiovascular disease may precipitate cardiac injury."Investigating inflammation
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"Even though they're not dying from that cardiac injury, something about that biomarker is providing some prognostic value beyond other risk factors that were controlled, so it could still be important in terms of identifying high-risk patients that enter the hospital with Covid-19," Gump said.
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Inflammation appears to be the mechanism that best explains the association between cardiac injury and Covid-19, said Dr. Mohammad Madjid, a cardiologist and assistant professor at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston.
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The finding's in Wednesday's JAMA Cardiology paper "make a lot of sense," Kevin Heffernan, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Syracuse University in New York, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email on Wednesday.
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A separate study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2018 found a significant association between respiratory infections, especially influenza, and acute heart attack, he said.
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"To date, many patients with COVID-19 are still hospitalized in China and other countries, such as Italy and Iran.