COVID-19 is creating a wave of heart disease

I recently treated one Covid-19 patient in his early 50s. He had been in perfect shape with no history of serious illness. When the fevers and body aches started, he locked himself in his room. But instead of getting better, his condition deteriorated and he eventually accumulated gallons of fluid in his legs. When he came to the hospital unable to catch a breath, it wasn’t his lungs that had pushed him to the brink — it was his heart. Now we are evaluating him to see if he needs a heart transplant.

An intriguing new study from Germany offers a glimpse into how SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. Researchers studied 100 individuals, with a median age of just 49, who had recovered from Covid-19. Most were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms.

An average of two months after they received the diagnosis, the researchers performed M.R.I. scans of their hearts and made some alarming discoveries: Nearly 80 percent had persistent abnormalities and 60 percent had evidence of myocarditis. The degree of myocarditis was not explained by the severity of the initial illness.