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Acute Cardiac Events Common During COVID Hospitalization
Among adults hospitalized for COVID-19, acute cardiac events are common, particularly among those with underlying heart disease, and are associated with more severe disease outcomes, a new study suggests.
“We expected to see acute cardiac events occurring among adults hospitalized with COVID-19, but were surprised by how frequently they occurred,” Rebecca C. Woodruff, PhD, MPH, of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology.
Overall, she said, “About 1 in 10 adults experienced an acute cardiac event — including heart attacks and acute heart failure — while hospitalized with COVID-19, and this included people with no preexisting heart disease.”
However, she added, “about a quarter of those with underlying heart disease had an acute cardiac event. These patients tended to experience more severe disease outcomes relative to patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who did not experience an acute cardiac event.”
The findings might be relevant to hospitalizations for other viral diseases, “though we can’t say for sure,” she noted. “This study was modeled off a previous study conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic among adults hospitalized with influenza. About 11.7% of [those] adults experienced an acute cardiac event, which was a similar percentage as what we found among patients hospitalized with COVID-19.”
The study was published online February 6 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Underlying Cardiac Disease Key
Woodruff and colleagues analyzed medical records on a probability sample of 8460 adults hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infection identified from 99 US counties in 14 US states (about 10% of the US population) from January to November 2021.
Among participants, 11.4% had an acute cardiac event during their hospitalization. The median age was 69 years; 56.5% were men; 48.7%, non-Hispanic White; 33.6%, non-Hispanic Black; 7.4%, Hispanic; and 7.1%, non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander.
As indicated, the prevalence was higher among those with underlying cardiac disease (23.4%) compared with those without (6.2%).
Acute ischemic heart disease (5.5%) and acute heart failure (5.4%) were the most prevalent events; 0.3% of participants had acute myocarditis or pericarditis.
Risk factors varied, depending on underlying cardiac disease status. Those who experienced one or more acute cardiac events had a greater risk for intensive care unit admission (adjusted risk ratio,1.9) and in-hospital death (aRR, 1.7) vs those who did not.
In multivariable analyses, the risk of experiencing acute heart failure was significantly greater among men (aRR, 1.5) and among those with a history of congestive heart failure (aRR, 13.5), atrial fibrillation (aRR, 1.6) or hypertension (aRR,1.3).
Among patients who experienced one or more acute cardiac events, 39.2% required an intensive care unit stay for a median of 5 days. Approximately 22.4% required invasive mechanical ventilation or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and 21.1% died while hospitalized.
“Persons at greater risk for experiencing acute cardiac events during COVID-19-associated hospitalizations might benefit from more intensive clinical evaluation and monitoring during hospitalization,” the authors conclude.
The team currently is taking a closer look at acute myocarditis among patients hospitalized with COVID-19, Woodruff said. Preliminary results were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2022 conference and a paper is forthcoming.
Contemporary Data Needed
James A. de Lemos, MD, co-chair of the American Heart Association’s COVID-19 CVD Registry Steering Committee and professor of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said the findings mirror his team’s clinical experience in 2020 and 2021 and echo what was seen in the AHA COVID registry, that is, a 0.3% rate of myocarditis.
“The major caveat is that [the findings] may not be generalizable to contemporary COVID infection, both due to changing viral variants and higher levels of immunity in the population,” he said.
“Rates of COVID hospitalization are markedly lower with the current dominant variants and we would expect the cardiac risk to be lower as well. I would like to see more contemporary data with current variants, particularly focused on higher risk patients with cardiovascular disease,” de Lemos added.
In a related editorial, George A. Mensa, MD, of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and colleagues suggest that the broader impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human health remains “incompletely examined.”
“The impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular mortality, in particular, appears to have varied widely, with no large increases seen in a number of the most developed countries but marked increases in hypertensive heart disease mortality seen in the United States in 2021,” they conclude. “The potential contribution of COVID-19 to these deaths, either directly or indirectly, remains to be determined.”
Source: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/987943?src=soc_fb_230207_mscpedt_news_mdscp_events&faf=1#vp_2
