A growing number of studies suggest many COVID-19 survivors experience some type of heart damage, even if they didn’t have underlying heart disease and weren’ tsick enough to be hospitalized. This latest twist has health care experts worried about a potential increase in heart failure.
These complications, such as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, could lead to an increase in heart failure down the road. There is also concern about people with pre-existing heart disease who don’t have COVID-19 but who avoid coming into the hospital with heart problems out of fear of being exposed to the virus.
Nearly one-fourth of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have been diagnosed with cardiovascular complications, which have been shown to contribute to roughly 40%
of all COVID-19-related deaths.
“There’s a group of people who seem to be more affected from the cardiac point of view,” said Dr. Mina Chung, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. But, she said, it can be difficult to identify who is at risk, or for those recovering from the virus to know if they’re having heart problems.
“A lot of people end up feeling exhausted for a while. They can’t get up to the exertion level they were at before. But it’s difficult to tease out whether or not it’s the lungstaking a little more time to heal or whether it’s a cardiac issue,” said Chung, who is leading the coordination of more than a dozen ongoing COVID-19 research studies funded by the American Heart Association.
Doctors advise those recovering from COVID-19 to watch for the following symptoms– and to consult their physician or a cardiologist if they experience them: increasing or extreme shortness of breath with exertion, chest pain, swelling of the ankles, heart palpitations or an irregular heartbeat, not being able to lie flat without shortness of breath, waking up at night short of breath, lightheadedness or dizzy spells.
Source: heart.org/en/news/2020/09/03/what-covid-19-is-doing-to-the-heart-even-after-recovery