Two studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that COVID-19 takes on the heart, raising the spectre of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalisation. STAT News reports that 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 signalling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflammation……more
Shared by Professor Shabir Moosa
Professor Moosa is a family physician in Soweto, Johannesburg. His interests are family medicine, community-oriented primary health care, and health management.
