Basically, symptomatic or not, hospitalized or not, when you get covid, your body has an inflammatory response. That response can damage your body.
We don’t yet know how prevalent or long-lasting the damage is, but there is enough of it for us to be worried about more than just death.
These are still early days and we are talking about long-term effects, which can’t be known until the long-term, by definition.
Dr. Valentina Puntmann, who led the study, told STAT that even though coronavirus is not strongly associated with heart symptoms, the muscle is showing to play a major role in battling the virus.
“The fact that 78 percent of ‘recovered’ [patients] had evidence of ongoing heart involvement means that the heart is involved in a majority of patients, even if COVID-19 illness does not scream out with the classical heart symptoms, such as anginal chest pain,” she said. “In my view, the relatively clear onset of COVID-19 illness provides an opportunity to take proactive action and to look for heart involvement early.”
But yeah just statistical malpractice on my part, I’m sure the person who ran the study is also participating in statistical malpractice or doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I particularly like the response that we’d clearly be digging bunkers if it was this bad. Nope, we’d be opening up for business and school. I know this because it’s what we’re doing.
Come on. Only 18 were identified as asymptomatic.
I am basically considered a fear monger among the people in my own life but it seems like this conversation is trying to take an obviously terrible situation and present it as unrealistically worse than it is.
It’s fine to say 78% of that obviously non random and non representative sample. It’s malpractice to pretend the 78% number applies to the population of cases at large.
It was a random 100 people who tested positive and had recovered within two weeks. So it’s actually excluding people with the most severe cases.
At this point I don’t think you are even reading the same study I am. 33 were hospitalized and characterized as “severely unwell”.
The only study I saw posted that had a 70% number said 5% had significant effects and the 70% number wasn’t about function, but some blood chemistry trait.
I literally just posted an article on a study, the study itself, and a quote from the lead researcher who called it ongoing heart involvement.
And anyone can post anecdotes. Two people next door to me had it. Both are fine. One is an athlete (varsity water polo I think as a freshman), she had symptoms, but recovered and has been training ever since.
Anecdotes??? It’s a fucking scientific study, I posted the link directly to the source study.
I wasn’t talking about that. Other anecdotes were posted. The study you posted has no conclusions about either long term measurable damage or, more importantly, function/outcomes. Just because a trace of an illness can be detected doesn’t mean it has a huge effect.
However, exactly what these findings mean for patients’ heart health in the long term is unclear, the authors said. The heart abnormalities seen in the study occasionally occur with other respiratory diseases such as influenza and may be temporary — indeed, mild cases of heart inflammation may not show symptoms and often get better on their own, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
Can we pump the brakes a bit on this before it becomes some accepted part of the cannon? It was elevated troponin levels in 70% of people who showed up on the Frankfurt Hospital Registry.
It’s unclear how one gets on that registry, which is obviously very important to know to determine the makeup of the study pool. But even the authors of the study said it didn’t apply to asymptomatic patients.
Also while it’s true the heart doesn’t heal, elevated troponin levels happen after marathons and are apparently fairly common. There seems to be some debate in the medical community about what exactly that means wrt to long term damage or health issues.
4.85 million people have recovered from covid in the US. It’s just bonkers to post as if 70-80% of people are having significant heart and lung problems after recovery but the vast majority of them either haven’t noticed it or it’s not being reported.
Nor could they. Myocarditis takes 3-6 months to resolve at a minimum, and my understanding is that some cases never do. Maybe it’ll be mild enough not to impact most people, who knows? Maybe it’ll just weaken the heart a bit and take a few years off life spans, who knows?
Meanwhile we’re racing as a country to get back to normal and even the party that believes in science is downplaying this.
You have a source on this? Cause I’ve seen numerous articles saying this stuff does apply to asymptomatic patients.
Or the effects are currently mild enough or their lifestyles sedative enough that they aren’t noticing. 1 in 100 Americans have recovered, and that’s skewed towards communities of color and poor Americans. You’re going to tell me it’s unfathomable that their suffering might go underreported?
This is ridiculous. That thing by fatboy’s data modeler was the best breakdown I’ve ever seen of how deaths are calculated, by far. I know so much more now than before I read it, and have real arguments to counteract the “deaths are massively undercounted for that sweet $39k bro” crowd.
“mild cases of heart inflammation may not show symptoms and often get better on their own, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.”
Yes, I posted it all when we talked about it the first time. It’s in the study itself:
Limitations
Our study has limitations. The findings are not validated for the use in pediatric patients 18 years and younger. They also do not represent patients during acute COVID-19 infection or those who are completely asymptomatic with COVID-19. Several patients within our cohort had new or persistent symptoms, thus increasing the likelihood of positive CMR findings. Outcome data remain outstanding. The imaging sequences used in this study have been well validated, standardized, and locked for the use in multicenter settings. The use of other imaging protocols, sequence parameters, or postprocessing approaches may yield different results.
The study pool was 100 people “from the registry” of some hospital in Frankfurt. The authors frustratingly do not go into any detail about what that means, so we have to presume it means someone showed up at the hospital to be tested.
This was my exact fear when we talked about this the first time. People would forget the very specific non-random nature of this study and just remember “78% heart damage”. It’s irresponsible of the authors to not be more clear about the study pool imo.
Also this reddit thread has a bunch of really good responses about what elevated troponin levels may or may not mean (which I also posted the first time we talked about this):
I’m as terrified of long term health effects as anyone. But I don’t think it does us any good to run with wildly unrealistic numbers like 78% chance of long term damage for an average case.
It appears I misread this part:
“ The findings would have been virtually impossible to pinpoint without this study, as the majority of patients didn’t exhibit any symptoms and these specific abnormalities detected by the MRI wouldn’t have been seen on an echocardiogram, which is more commonly used in the standard clinical setting.”
They meant didn’t exhibit any heart symptoms, not asymptomatic of covid? It’s not clear, but if the other data says 18% asymptomatic then that’s probably what this unclear sentence meant.
Meaning the heart maintains full function while still having some scarring or muscle damage (from what I’ve read). That was the context of “the heart doesn’t heal”. Maybe heart muscle doesn’t heal is more accurate.
I’m not clear on how they defined asymptomatic here. I mean once they detect heart inflammation, are you still asymptomatic?
