While heart attacks have declined (primarily with the decline in smoking rates), they still occur at many ages.
Things like cardiomyopathy that is asymptomatic until someone drops dead are uncommon enough that mass screening would not be cost-effective in terms of lives saved per $, compared to other medical screenings/care that the $ could be spent on. But they do occur enough to find their way into the news.
Yes, yes…there are other potential causes, but still hard not to wonder.
I think the issue of COVID possibly causing ‘unexpected’ heart attacks in people w/o identified heart problems will be explained by autopsies but also when researchers looked at excess deaths during COVID. If there’s a sudden jump in heart attacks that comes and then goes with COVID, we may reasonably point to the virus, right? I mean I guess you could argue stress or isolation is somewhat to blame, but I’d put my money on COVID.
In March, the father of a friend dropped dead of a heart attack after eating his nightly bowl of ice cream. Never had any heart issues before – in his early 70s. This was in NJ right outside of NYC and the family now suspects he may have had COVID. I don’t believe he was tested before he was cremated. So sad.
Are we sure it was a heart attack and not Sudden Cardiac Arrest? My husband survived Sudden Cardiac Arrest (survival rate is 8%) 19 months ago. The way it was explained to us is that Sudden Cardiac Arrest is electrical vs heart attack which is “plumbing”. Although a heart attack can cause cardiac arrest.
Let me say this as nicely as I can.
If I had a dollar for every friend and relative who either had a virus in the late winter/early spring and is convinced that they had an undiagnosed case of Covid. Or had one of more symptoms of it, say Covid toes. I would be a rich woman.
What that does it “allows” them to do is go about their pre pandemic life because they are convinced that they already had Covid. No antibody test, just a “feeling”
Every year, previously healthy people drop dead from a variety of issues. Unfortunately it happens, has always happened.
What is happening now is that people did and maybe still are putting off going to the doctor because of fear of catching coronavirus. They have symptoms that they are ignoring.
People have always ignored things they don’t want to confront, now they have a different excuse. But people do and always have, dropped dead without any symptoms at all.
@deb922 I don’t disagree with much of what you are saying. I’ve even had people tell me they are sure they had it and they believe the results of their subsequent antibody testing to be a “false negative.”
That said, it is not unreasonable to think viral myocarditis is one possibility when a seemingly fit and healthy 38 y/o dies suddenly of a heart issue while we are in the middle of a pandemic, and the pandemic involves a virus that appears to cause heart injury in some people.
That’s all.
The good thing now is folks who drop dead for any unexplained reason are likely to be tested for Covid - esp if they are young. Eventually we should have answers, if not from our country, then from other countries around the world looking (Italy, Germany, etc).
I’m glad they are looking at survivors too.
Answers only come to those who look.
At least there’s a Wired article out mentioning heart issues along with exercise. There don’t seem to be many studies just yet, but maybe news will inspire more:
https://www.wired.com/story/if-youve-just-had-covid-exercise-might-not-be-good-for-you/
In the Ohio State study, of the students who had covid and then were seen to have myocarditis, half had been asymptomatic and half symptomatic. There were only four students with covid and myocarditis, tiny numbers here, but it does show that people who were asymptomatic can nevertheless get post-covid heart issues.
In the German study it said 12/100 were asymptomatic. I read that the percentage didn’t vary much. Does that mean 8 or 9 had heart abnormalities if the percentage overall was 78%? Have you seen raw numbers? I might have missed it.
In the German study they didn’t say how many of the people who were asymptomatic had heart issues, if any. Or, at least, I looked hard for that information in the study and didn’t find it.
But the heart analysis in the Ohio State study was only done 30 or 45 days after infection right? We don’t know what those scans look like after longer. I have read that many illnesses cause visible heart inflammation in the weeks after infection. I really want to see those longer term rescans of the German and the Ohio State students.
Also, there seems to be confusion about what constitutes a “heart attack.” Typically, a “heart attack” is a myocardial infarction. This happens when one of the major arteries that feeds the heart is blocked, causing lack of blood flow (and oxygen) to the heart muscle, which causes the tissue to die. It’s caused by a blockage, either from plaque in the artery, or a blood clot in the artery, or a combination of the two.
COVID has been causing blood clots in previously healthy individuals-could result in a myocardial infarction in typically indisposed individuals-they didn’t have any plaque blockage in their coronary arteries. But they threw a clot that ended up in the heart and killed them.
Then there is sudden cardiac death-maybe caused by a fatal arrhythmia, or by fulminant heart failure, or endocarditis, or myocarditis, or cardiomyopathy. None of those are “heart attacks.”
So wading through all this is a challenge, especially in the age of COVID.
A friend of mine told me of a tragedy. Her D’s friend met a group of girls at a fast food restaurant for lunch on a weekend. They were 15 years old. All of a sudden, one of the girls said loudly “OH MY GOD.” She then put her head on the table and died.
Everyone said she died of a “heart attack.” She most certainly did not. She had a fatal arrhythmia that caused her death. So sometimes this stuff gets confusing and results in incorrect conclusions.
The German study looked at people an average of 71 days after diagnosis. Some of them had been diagnosed three months or more before the study. Not only did the study discover that 60% of this group had myocarditis, but also, in this study, the people who had a longer time since diagnosis weren’t any less likely to have the heart problems.
If the heart issues start going away after a month or two, that should have been evident in the German study. The people who were three or four months past diagnosis should have had fewer heart problems. But they didn’t; they had just as many.
All I saw was the percentage didn’t vary much whether one was asymptomatic or hospitalized. “Much” to me implies some, but how much? I wasn’t able to find numbers back when I looked (or since).
Monoclonal Antibody treatment from Eli Lilly. The study is not yet peer reviewed but looks hopeful .
X
This episode is in queue for me.
Are you certain about “can infect others”?
I thought TWIV has gone out of its way to emphasize there needs to be a minimal viral load in order to infect.
Are you saying TWIV said the virus will replicate in a vaccinated person to the point that there is sufficient viral load to pass on to others?
I’ll listen to the episode for clarification.
The German study said (my bold), " In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis."
In other words, they discovered that the heart effects were independent of the severity of the initial disease: people who were less affected, and that would include people who were asymptomatic, had just as many heart problems as the people who were hospitalized.
The part of the quote above that says “time from the initial diagnosis” is also scary. Someone who was more than three months past their diagnosis was just as likely to have current heart effects as someone who was less than two months past their diagnosis.
To follow up on @Nrdsb4 's explanation of the difference between death from a heart attack (myocardial infarction) and other sudden cardiac deaths, we know that covid causes both those sudden deaths, unfortunately.
We know that covid causes blood clots, which can lead to heart attacks as well as other bad effects. We also know that the heart inflammation (myocarditis) we’ve been discussing can cause arrhythmia—the heartbeat can go wrong, or just stop altogether, and if a person’s heart stops beating they die.