Your heart and COVID-19
While some people have become COVID-19 complacent, for those who value their heart health, or have a chronic condition, there's every reason to stay informed.
Researchers have discovered how COVID-19 damages the heart, making possible future treatments for the disease that continues to infect, hospitalise, and kill.
An initial study by researchers at The University of Queensland found COVID-19 damaged the DNA in cardiac tissue. Similar damage was not detected in influenza samples.
COVID-19 and influenza are both severe respiratory viruses, but the study found they affected cardiac tissue very differently.
Researcher Dr Kulasinghe explained that compared to the 2009 flu pandemic, COVID-19 has led to more severe and long-term cardiovascular disease, but what was causing that at a molecular level was not known.
“During our study, we could not detect viral particles in the cardiac tissues of COVID-19 patients, but we found tissue changes associated with DNA damage and repair.
“DNA damage and repair mechanisms foster genomic instability and are related to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative disorders, so understanding why this is happening in COVID-19 patients is important,” Dr Kulasinghe said.
In this study, it was possible to get deeper insights into the heart by using actual cardiac tissues collected during autopsies from seven COVID-19 patients from Brazil, two people who died from influenza and six control patients.
UQ’s Professor John Fraser, who established the international COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium, said the findings provided insights into how COVID-19 impacted the body compared to other respiratory viruses.
“When we looked at the influenza cardiac tissue samples, we identified that it caused excess inflammation,” Professor Fraser said.
“Whereas we found COVID-19 attacked the heart’s DNA – directly and not just as a knock-on from inflammation.
The study suggests the two viruses affect cardiac tissue very differently. This will be further researched using larger cohort studies.
Researchers say that they have categorically shown COVID-19 is not just like the flu.
That is the first step in working out what treatments might be best to repair that heart.
For further reading: UQ News
