Heart Damage Among COVID-19 Patients Lead to Higher Risk for Death, Study Finds

COVID-19 patients who experience heart damage are more likely to die from the disease, a new study found Monday.

The study was conducted by The Mount Sinai doctors on 305 hospitalized patients. Their research was published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.

Cardiac ultrasounds, or echocardiograms, show that heart damage is a common injury among COVID-19 patients.

The most common forms heart damage take place at the ventricles and having extra fluid around the organ is also a common dysfunction.

With such abnormalities, a COVID-19 patient is more than 11 times at higher risk of death among hospitalized patients.

They noted that the increased risk comes when the heart changes in size, shape, structure or function, said a Reuters report.

The Mount Sinai team said the findings can help doctors better understand the effects of heart injury to their patients in order to provide appropriate care.

"Early detection of structural abnormalities may dictate more appropriate treatments," co-author dr. Valentin Fuster told Daily Mail. Fuster is also a physician-in-chief at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

The patients involved from the research were from four New York City hospitals within the Mount Sinai system and two hospitals in Milan, Italy. Scans were performed from March to May 2020.

Detecting Heart Damage

The researchers looked at elevated levels of troponin in the hospitalized patients. Tropinin is a protein released when the heart has been injured.

It can be noted that during the course of their research they found that, death rates went up when troponin levels did.

A death rate of 5.2% was seen in patients without elevated troponin levels in their blood.

It was 18.6% when troponin was high but the patient's heart looked normal.

Then, death rate surges up to 31.7% if patients have high troponin and so-called heart remodeling, a change in a heart's size or shape.

There are other factors that come at play that could affect risk for death.

More importantly, troponin elevation is only tied to death among those with heart remodeling.

Other cases still have to undergo echocardiography to guide health care providers in diagnosing, testing and treating them, said another co-author Dr. Gennaro Giustino.

"Patients with a bad echo need much closer follow-up and more aggressive treatments," said Dr. Carl Lavie of Ochsner Health in New Orleans.

Heart Damage to Look Out For

According to Medical Xpress, doctors commonly look at lung X-rays, medical history, blood markers, and other indicators to find out if a patient is at higher risk of developing severe disease.

In the recent study, the researchers found that damage to the heart's right ventricle is a strong and independent predictor of severe COVID-19.

If a patient shows signs of an impaired right ventricle pumping capacity, their heart is unable to pump oxygen-poor blood to the lungs.

They are 2.5 times more likely to die during COVID-19 hospitalization.

Most patients (60%) showed signed of myocardial injury. It is during this kind of heart damage when troponin is released.

About 38% of them had heart damage when they were hospitalized and almost 25% developed the heart injury during hospitalization.

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