From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrythmias, and heart failure.
Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus’ impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected.
The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”
Others agree the results of the study, published in Nature Medicine on 7 February, are powerful. “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, who recently conducted a similar, much smaller analysis. She cautions that the new study will need to be replicated, and that it was retrospective, possibly introducing inaccuracies such as incorporating faulty diagnoses from patient records…
Just how the virus causes long-term damage to the heart and blood vessels remains a matter of debate and active research. One possible mechanism is inflammation of the endothelial cells that line the inside of the heart and blood vessels, Al-Aly says. But the researchers also include a laundry list of potential mechanisms, including lingering damage from direct viral invasion of the heart muscle; elevated levels of proinflammatory chemical messengers called cytokines that lead to scarring of the heart; and persistent virus in sites not effectively dealt with by the immune system. “The putative mechanistic pathways are still in the realm of speculation or hypothesis,” Al-Aly says.
The authors say their findings suggest millions of COVID-19 survivors could suffer long-term consequences, straining health systems for years to come. “Governments and health systems around the world should be prepared to deal with the likely significant contribution of the COVID-19 pandemic to a rise in the burden of cardiovascular diseases,” they write in the paper.
Al-Aly adds: “What really worries me is that some of these conditions are chronic conditions that will literally scar people for a lifetime. It’s not like you wake up tomorrow and suddenly no longer have heart failure.”
From Science Magazine.
Hopkins now tallies more than 915,000 US Covid-19 deaths to date as I post this (915,620 at 10:30 a.m. EDT), with a weekly death rate of more than 16,000.
As a lucky-to-be-alive 2018 heart valve replacement patient (just turned 76, and now wrassling daily with Parkinson's), you won't find me at any of these pre-adolescent #FreedumbConvoy2022 anti-vax / anti-mask rallies. I'm triple-vaxxed, masked-up, and continuing to lie low.
Yeah, that puts me in the Sheeple cohort.
FEB 12TH PM UPDATE
919,172 US deaths. We comprise 4.3% of world population, but 19% of aggregate Covid19 cases and 16% of total Covid19 deaths.
WAR COMING TO UKRAINE?
I guess we'll know shortly. I certainly hope not.
Lots of misinformed opinion out there. Two knowledgeable, credible sources: Anne Applebaum, and Tom Nichols.
It could all quickly go quite bad. In the words of the eminent foreign policy analyst Mike Tyson, "everybody got a plan 'til they get hit."
SCIENCE MAGAZINE UPDATE
It took just one virus to cripple the world’s economy and kill millions of people; yet virologists estimate that trillions of still-unknown viruses exist, many of which might be lethal or have the potential to spark the next pandemic. Now, they have a new—and very long—list of possible suspects to interrogate. By sifting through unprecedented amounts of existing genomic data, scientists have uncovered more than 100,000 novel viruses, including nine coronaviruses and more than 300 related to the hepatitis Delta virus, which can cause liver failure.
“It’s a foundational piece of work,” says J. Rodney Brister, a bioinformatician at the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s National Library of Medicine who was not involved in the new study. The work expands the number of known viruses that use RNA instead of DNA for their genes by an order of magnitude. It also “demonstrates our outrageous lack of knowledge about this group of organisms,” says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group in New York City that is raising money to launch a global survey of viruses. The work will also help launch so-called petabyte genomics—the analyses of previously unfathomable quantities of DNA and RNA data. (One petabyte is 1015 bytes.)
That wasn’t exactly what computational biologist Artem Babaian had in mind when he was in between jobs in early 2020. Instead, he was simply curious about how many coronaviruses—aside from the virus that had just launched the COVID-19 pandemic—could be found in sequences in existing genomic databases…
Swell.
ON DECK
Props to Zoe Chance for the heads-up. Just got it. About halfway through. Stay tuned.
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