![]() ![]() Researchers have made strides toward understanding how to prevent COVID-19 from attacking the heart and blood vessels. “The question is, is there some injury to the heart that’s leading to symptoms that we’re not seeing?” “To me there’s no question these individuals are suffering real symptoms,” says James de Lemos, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a co-chair of the American Heart Association’s COVID-19 CVD registry steering committee. Scientists are still baffled about what’s causing them. And about a month after she recovered from COVID-19, she began feeling random heart palpitations.Īdding to the mystery, some people who had only mild or even asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 also report long-lasting symptoms such as heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, and extreme fatigue. Still, she found herself so short of breath she had to step out of a yoga class and couldn’t walk across her school building without needing to sit down. Oddly, Huff took a battery of heart-related tests and the results came back normal. Others continue to have elevated levels of troponin, a chemical that’s released into the blood whenever there’s damage to the heart muscle. For some patients, MRI scans show signs of inflammation months after clearing the virus. Now it has become clear that COVID-19’s cardiovascular damage doesn’t resolve as soon as a patient recovers from the initial infection. ( Coronavirus in the U.S.: Where cases are growing and declining.) Autopsies also revealed masses of tiny blood clots in places where doctors don’t normally see them, such as the liver and the kidneys. Even in March 2020, physicians were seeing unexpectedly high rates of blood clots in their patients, leading to a rise in heart attacks and strokes. ![]() “We realized very, very early that clotting was playing a major role,” says Jeffrey Berger, director of New York University Langone’s Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. “I was scared of the chest pain because I didn’t know what it was.” Ultimately, her doctor referred her to a cardiologist who specializes in treating patients who have recovered from COVID-19 but still experience cardiac symptoms.įrom the earliest months of the pandemic, scientists have suspected that COVID-19 is not just a disease of the lungs, but also a disease of the heart and blood vessels. “It got to the point where I just couldn’t,” she says. Although she’d always tried to live a healthy lifestyle-doing yoga or walking every day-she soon found herself too frightened to exercise. Huff, an Illinois school administrator in her 30s, has a family history of heart issues, and she worried that it might signal something serious. She had just recovered from a terrible case of COVID-19 about two or three weeks earlier, during which she’d had just about every symptom imaginable: sore throat, headache, congestion, coughing, loss of smell, body aches, a mild case of pinkeye, and a constant heaviness in her chest like there was a bowling ball weighing it down.īut this feeling in her chest was different-it was a sharper pain that came on suddenly. Danielle Huff was on her treadmill when she first noticed the pain in her chest. ![]()
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