Covid and the Heart: It Spares No One – Johns Hopkins

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/covid-and-the-heart-it-spares-no-one

by alwillis • 4 years ago

192 153 4 years ago

publichealth.jhu.edu

smitty1110• 4 years ago

Dr. Al-Aly's paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3?s=08

yamrzou• 4 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30249618

azth• 4 years ago

What about those that took the vaccine?

blueline• 4 years ago

This study was done before vaccination was widely available. Is there any indication that, for example, breakthrough infections would have a different result long term?
Yes. We are [studying] this, but I think the jury is still out. We're certainly very interested in addressing that publicly as soon as we can.

smegsicle• 4 years ago

neat! that first quoted line has css text-transform:uppercase in the article, so firefox copies as original, lowercase text, but chromium copies as all caps!

lapetitejort• 4 years ago

THIS STUDY WAS DONE BEFORE VACCINATION WAS WIDELY AVAILABLE. IS THERE ANY INDICATION THAT, FOR EXAMPLE, BREAKTHROUGH INFECTIONS WOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT RESULT LONG TERM?
Yes. We are [studying] this, but I think the jury is still out. We're certainly very interested in addressing that publicly as soon as we can.

exo-pla-net3• 4 years ago

If you're referring to cases of myocarditis caused by vaccination itself, the cases are negligible: 2.3 per 100,000 [1]. Compare that with the apparent near-certainty of heart damage (and likely brain damage) if you contract COVID while being unvaccinated, and the decision to not get vaccinated is not just selfish but self-destructive.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737

vikingerik• 4 years ago

Heart damage from Covid is nothing like a "near-certainty". The vast majority don't experience it, upwards of 95% depending on the study. Framing this as "near-certainty" or "spares no one" is irresponsible fear-mongering.

j16sdiz• 4 years ago

It's 1 in 10,000 according to NHS's vaccine factsheet.

andrew_3• 4 years ago

near-certainty of heart damage (and likely brain damage) if you contract COVID while being unvaccinated

This is the first I've seen it presented as a near-certainty. Where is this documented?

the_doctah• 4 years ago

Please knock it off with the "selfish" nonsense. Even if everyone got vaccinated, the virus would still get passed around. Then, when the next variant inevitably arises, and everyone's immunity wears off, we're back at square one. The anti-anti-vax crowd is just a walking meme at this point.

darzu• 4 years ago

What’s the effect size? Didn’t see this anywhere in the article and seems pretty important to know.

rkk3• 4 years ago

What was the methodology around asymptomatic covid cases and cardiac outcomes?

This seems like a sensationalist claim.

mmaunder• 4 years ago

Don’t obsess over this. It’ll distract you and stress you out, which comes with its own health risks. None of us get out alive anyway. Go live as healthy a life as you can, find happiness, and help others when the opportunity presents.

vkou3• 4 years ago

You don't need to obsess over this, but you do need to remember that there has been, and continues to be a large pro-COVID faction that insists that getting everyone sick with it will be no big deal, because it only kills <0.X%> of people in <particular age range>.

They were, of course, speaking from a position of ignorance of long-term side effects, because the data wasn't yet in. It's been two years, and in many ways, the data is still not in yet.

We'll have another go-around[1] on the COVID rodeo next holiday season, if another dangerous variant emerges.

[1] Just because the news has forgotten about the virus, doesn't mean that the virus has forgotten about us. There are more daily worldwide cases right now, then there have been at any point prior to November 2021. That's a lot of opportunity for variants to mutate.

mwint• 4 years ago

It's been two years, and in many ways, the data is still not in yet.

But we hopefully aren’t expected to hide until the data are in?

brink• 4 years ago

A life well-lived comes with inherent risks.

I'm not saying I want to go live recklessly, but I'd rather die slightly less old and happy, than old and miserable because I spent it worrying only to realize on my deathbed that I never lived.

president• 4 years ago

Most are willing to live life to the fullest with negligible risks. Others who want to live life locked down and living in a plastic bubble, feel free to do so. If you think Covid can be eradicated with zero-covid policies, look at how China is faring [1]. Live and let live.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/refuse-quarantine-frustr...

goodluckchuck• 4 years ago

speaking from a position of ignorance of long-term side effects, because the data wasn't yet in.

That’s a two-way street (which I don’t think you’re denying). In 20 years it may turn out that the shot was worse than the disease.

socksset• 4 years ago

We need to just all stay inside forever. Be safe my friend.

kragen4• 4 years ago

A more accurate headline would be "it spares 93%–97% of people," though the interview meticulously omitted almost all quantifiable information. The hazard ratios in the paper smitty1110 cited https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3?s=08 are mostly 1.49–1.85, which as I understand it means that people with covid were 1½–2 times as likely to experience the condition, pericarditis or stroke or whatever, than thr control group. The exceptions are things that normally happen only once in a lifetime, like cardiac arrest (HR=2.45), so we're still talking about a tiny fraction of people.

This justifies the statement in the paper's abstract, "Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial," but (unless I'm misunderstanding the paper) shows that the interview headline is an irresponsible, sensationalist lie.

exo-pla-net3• 4 years ago

False.

We went into it thinking that [the risk] was going to be most pronounced and evident in people who smoked a lot or had diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, or some [other] risk factors. What we found is that even in people who did not have any heart problems start with, were athletic, did not have a high BMI, were not obese, did not smoke, did not have kidney disease or diabetes—even in people who were previously healthy and had no risk factors or problems with the heart—COVID-19 affected them in such a way that manifested the higher risk of heart problems than people who did not get COVID-19.

They found that even mild COVID damaged otherwise healthy people's hearts so badly that their risk for heart problems are now comparable to those of obese people.

In other words, it does damage your heart. That damage might result in a heart attack, reflected in the increased hazard ratio.

bigfudge• 4 years ago

No, there's not enough data to be sure either way, but given that some/most people experience absolutely no lingering symptoms the simplest explanation is that even mild disease cases damage in some people.

EDIT: to be clear. We have no idea if the outcome-generating process is continuous or discontinuous. You seem to think it's continuous, analogous to risks from smoking or obesity, but others would assume not.

margalabargala• 4 years ago

They found that even mild COVID damaged otherwise healthy people's hearts so badly that their risk for heart problems are now comparable to those of obese people.
In other words, it does damage your heart. That damage might result in a heart attack, reflected in the increased hazard ratio.

This seems an inaccurate reading of what's in the study. They did not find that all people who had COVID had heart damage, which would be the case if "it does damage your heart" were true. Instead it found that some previously healthy people now had some heart damage.

TrevorJ6• 4 years ago

They found that even mild COVID damaged otherwise healthy people's hearts so badly that their risk for heart problems are now comparable to those of obese people.

False.

The study did NOT look for heart damage in the study population as a proximal cause for other cardiac events, it simply looked at incidence of cardiac events. Your interpretation is one possible explanation as to why this might be, but the study neither supports nor disproves this explanation.

fallingknife2• 4 years ago

In other words, it does damage your heart. That damage might result in a heart attack, reflected in the increased hazard ratio.

Or it only damages the heart in a small number of patients, and that damage always results in heart conditions. It is not possible to tell the difference between these two possibilities without actually taking a sample and looking for asymptomatic heart damage in the affected patients, which this study did not do.

These are the stats for heart conditions on mild covid patients from the paper. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3/figures/5 They don't look bad at all. Where is it stated that this effect is as bad as obesity?

bhk• 4 years ago

First, the study does not even use the term "mild". They did look at three levels of severity: non-hospitalized, hospitalized, and admitted to ICU. The "non-hospitalized" group surely includes people who would describe their case as "worse than any flu", as well as those would describe theirs as "mild" (e.g. a few sniffles for a few days, like a number of my friends recently.)

Second, the hazard ratios differ widely between the three levels of severity. For example, for MACE (major adverse cardiac events) versus the contemporary control group, hazard ratios are:

    Non-hospitalized  1.26
    Hospitalized      2.41
    ICU               4.36

One would expect a similar gradation of risk by severity among the "non-hospitalized" group.

postalrat• 4 years ago

Is "False." the new "Wrong."?

wrs• 4 years ago

The headline is badly phrased but I wouldn’t call it a “lie”. The intended interpretation is that significant long term risks were observed across the broad population, including otherwise healthy people. I perceive pretty widespread belief to the contrary right now, which could be dangerous for public health planning.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Future experimental vaccines could contain tracker chips and cause autism.

^--- also not a lie.

I'd expect John Hopkins to do better though.

jah242• 4 years ago

I would add that for the non-hospitalised groups it is substantially lower again at more like HR of 1.3-1.4 - (see supplementary tables - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...)

I would also add a few factors that likely mean that this is an upper bound: 1. As noted this is without vaccination 2. The mean age in the study is 60-65 (depending on the regression) 3. There is inherent bias in testing uptake (case ascertainment) over the period of the study early in the pandemic. This means the sample is inevitably skewed towards more severe cases (and will miss a very large fraction of asymptomatic cases) than either the population of Covid positive individuals or the sample of positive covid people today (as now testing is abundant).

This is not to say that the study is wrong that COVID increases one's risk of heart disease but for me the language used in the interview does seem inappropriate.

xorfish2• 4 years ago

The increased risk affects everyone, even if the risk doesn't materialize for everyone.

jdmichal2• 4 years ago

"At increased risk for being at increased risk" is theoretically meaningful, but practically nonsensical unless you can tell which group someone falls into. If you can't, you may as well collapse all the probability into either being at increased risk or not.

dash2• 4 years ago

I now feel much less happy than I did. "Significant increase" could mean anything. A risk ratio of 1.49-1.85 is a huge increase. These conditions are rare but not that rare. Now I should be twice as worried about them? Oosh. Will someone at least tell me that Omicron's not so bad?

wsc981• 4 years ago

Life's too short to worry about everything and anything. What can you do about it anyway. Pretty much everyone will get COVID at some point and some people will develop heart conditions. You won't be able to prevent getting infected, so you might as well just accept it.

timr3• 4 years ago

1.5 is a small increase, particularly when the baseline probabilities are small (as they are here).

For context, a "big" increase would be something like smoking, where the effect sizes are measured in HR multiples of ten.

throwaway22032• 4 years ago

It's baffling that a public health institution would discredit themselves so obviously in this way.

I don't understand the world that these people live in. It's like they don't understand the concept of trust _at all_, they're a few iterations of doubling down on just going into some sort of echochamber nonsense.

The headline isn't even true in the superlative sense (e.g. maybe it spares the odd person, but we make a reasonable allowance for that in colloquial speech.). It's in fact the case that it spares the vast majority - most of us have zero detectable symptoms, both during infection and after the fact.

everybodyknows• 4 years ago

It's baffling that a public health institution would discredit themselves so obviously ...

Here's your proximate cause: The article's author is "director of public relations and marketing". This may go some way toward explaining why there's no link to the actual research document in the article.

quadrifoliate• 4 years ago

Looking at the title, I am sad to see the discourse in research sink to this level over the last few years (well, I think so – perhaps it was already at this level before?).

Honestly, it's hard to blame the author(s) for using such a clickbait title when Governments across the world have done precisely the same thing by trivializing the effects of a largely unknown disease, banning public health measures, or declaring the lifting of public health restrictions as a "Freedom Day".

I don't have a great solution for this – perhaps just that we should all tend towards discourse that is a bit more dry and phrased in terms of data; and steer it back to that phrasing when required.

EricE4• 4 years ago

The experiences of countries that didn't lock down proves that the "restrictions" were ineffective at best and more and more it looks like they caused and are continuing to cause more harm.

Lockdowns in cities was particularly dumb. Let's lock everyone indoor, in apartment buildings with shared air systems - yup, brilliant strategy for a highly contagious respiratory virus. If the weather is nice enough for people to be outside, the more that are outside the better!

The selective enforcement driven by non-medial reasoning was even more egregious. For example, forcing small businesses to close while allowing big box stores to remain open - either the virus is deadly enough to warrant the prohibition of ALL public contact or it isn't. Same with the ridiculous posturing during the "summer of love" as if the virus was smart enough to avoid spreading at BLM protests, but deadly everywhere else outdoors.

All the lockdowns did was foster the greatest transfer of wealth from the little guys to the big guys in all of human history :p

Even the definition of "emergency" is now hopelessly devalued. The best analogy to demonstrate this that I have heard: If someone asks to borrow your car for two weeks and after two years they still haven't brought it back, they are no longer borrowing your car.

How many people ended up in the hospital on a ventilator and potentially died needlessly while the government panned ivermectin and HCQ and the media/big tech demonized, banned and flat out declared war on anyone talking about anything other than complying with ridiculous mandates and vaccination as the only solution? Going on a ventilator was a 50/50 death sentence. ANYTHING that could have POSSIBLY prevented ANYONE from ever having to go into the hospital should have been thrown at anyone willing to try it. Ivermectin and HCQ are DECADES old, given to millions if not billions of people and even if they were 100% ineffective they certainly were not going to do harm to the VAST majority of people. But here we are. People still make fun of Ivermectin with the "horse dewormer" slur. It's very common for drugs to have human and animal uses and anyone who implies otherwise is either grossly ignorant or the most evil kind of person out there deliberately distorting actual science for political/tribal reasons.

I could go on, but the parameters of the disease were well known by the March after the December the virus really broke on our consciousness. The real problem is politics and money took over. Big pharma had a risk free gravy train as long as the "restrictions" and vaccine mandates were underway. Politicians got to boss people around and make themselves even more important. The government, media and big tech blatantly collaborated in flogging the messaging in ways never before seen in human history.

Trust in government, the media and big tech is at an all time low for very, very good reasons.

What's going to be really tragic - there may be a future biological incident where there are legitimate reasons for dramatic and long term restrictions; good luck getting everyone to cooperate after the ridiculous way COVID was handled. The more evidence that keeps coming out that much of the response and overreaction to it was utterly unwarranted, the more trust is going to be eroded. The most egregious that I am just dumbfounded that here is ongoing controversy over: it's beyond criminal that ANY kids are being forced to still wear face masks. It's flat out child abuse mainly to pleasure the teacher unions.

That you seem to be implying that governments didn't take COVID seriously enough when it's beyond obvious now that the opposite is true - the vast majority of governments dramatically overreacted and probably made things FAR worse with their policies shows just how big of a disconnect remains, unfortunately.

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

The lockdowns were not ineffective. They were only less effective because of people who cried "muh freedumbs". Masks have repeatedly shown to be effective, especially the N95/KN95 variety. Vaccines were shown to be very effective, if not 100% preventative. Big Tech is not a publisher and expects you to be skeptical of things you read that don't come from mainstream sources. Mainstream sources, other than Fox, tend to have some bias, but almost always contain facts they are based on. Fox however regularly breaks that trust between media and viewers/readers and has been called out over and over.

----

There are tens of thousands of stories that go out every day without errors. Pulling 8 or 10 stories out of those thousands upon thousands of stories that go out on legit news sources being incorrect or slipping in way too much does not bring into question the other 99.99% legit stories. You aren't making much sense to me here. Almost a million people have died above and beyond what normally would not have died in the USA due to Covid-19. I don't know about you, but that makes me extremely sad with the knowledge that 70-80% of those deaths could have been prevented with vaccines, masking, and observing proper protocols. It breaks my fucking heart to be honest, and I didn't even lose anyone close to me personally.

etaioinshrdlu• 4 years ago

I had chest pains for the first time in my life in 2021 and I’m in late 20’s. Doctor couldn’t find anything. Felt much better after a month. But it came back after getting a booster.

I had COVID confirmed in 2020 with no such issues. For me, as far as i can tell, the chest pains are more correlated with the vaccinations. I’m rather grumpy at the idea of getting additional boosters.

abhishekjha• 4 years ago

Surprisingly I am having the same symptoms. Like I can feel chest pain during cycling and hours after I am done. This was not the case earlier.

I haven't got it checked yet. I am gonna do that soon.

brianwawok• 4 years ago

It's possible they are related, or also possible just coincidence. When I was 31 or 32 I had a bout of crazy chest pains. Did all the tests, got all the EKGs... end result was Dr told me I was fine, lay off the stress. Has not come back, so I think it was just a reminder to take care of my flesh bag a big better.

yosito• 4 years ago

I'm sorry you had that experience with vaccines. I know it won't make much difference to you personally, but the truth is that these sorts of chest pains and heart problems are far more common in immune-naive people who are infected with covid than in people who get vaccines.

andrew_3• 4 years ago

Could you drop a link to some research for side effects of immune-naive infection versus vaccine? I've read the latest on the Pfizer side effects but have nothing to compare it to for immune-naive infection effects and rate of those kinds of symptoms.

EricE4• 4 years ago

Citation needed!

In fact, there is more and more data every day the EXACT opposite is true.

tui_smuggler• 4 years ago

Same for me (30), second dose gave me chest pains for 4/5 days. Doc did the standard checks and came back with nothing. First time I have ever experienced anything like this. I will not be ever injecting myself with another rna based "vaccine" again.

lta• 4 years ago

I've had a similar experience... Long before COVID 19 existed. Stress remains a risk factor with a much higher prevalence than COVID or vaccine induced myocarditis

wolverine8769• 4 years ago

Sorry about the chest pain, but I don't think a guess that vaccines caused chest pains - something that many people have experienced long before Coronavirus and vaccines - informs the conversation.

MisterMower2• 4 years ago

Did the guys who did the study control for vaccination status? Seems very relevant to the conversation. It’s a proven fact a small portion of recipients experience heart issues after getting one of the mRNA vaccines.

anamax2• 4 years ago

Do we know whether Covid-19 is different wrt heart and other effects than other corona viruses or even flu viruses in general? For example, how is Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 different from 2002-4's SARS-CoV-1 in this respect?

I ask because the reports of mental sluggishness for a couple of months after Covid-19 reminded me of how I felt after some previous flus.

andrew_3• 4 years ago

New studies are suggesting links to nerve damage as a cause for long-covid symptoms https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-sympto...

anamax2• 4 years ago

My question is how different covid-19 is.

One of the things that has come out of Covid-19 is how little was actually known about flus, despite the fact that flus have been killing 30-70k Americans each year for decades. This ignorance is "interesting" because "we need to be ready for the next Spanish flu" has been at the core of the "give us more money for research" argument for decades.

For example, it looks like we still don't understand transmission in any useful sense. There was some reasonable research in the late 40s but we've learned more in the last two years than in the intervening 80 years.

Yes, some of the tools used in the last two years weren't available 20 years ago but they were available 10 years ago. That said, many of the tools have been available, albeit unused, for 80+ years.

throwawaycities3• 4 years ago

There was a lot of information coming out of college athletics early on consistent with the research in this article. Young, healthy athletes that were asymptomatic showed signs of inflammation in the heart.

Since then there were follow up studies which were split in their findings. The early studies used MRI testing and suggested “high-risk” of heart damage/myocarditis in the athletes. Follow up studies tended not to use MRI, opting for testing for certain proteins associated with heart inflammation and ultra sounds and those studies found heart damage to be uncommon in the athletes.

thelettere6• 4 years ago

If there's been such heart damage to athletes that caught it, how come they all are invariably coming back to the same exact performance they had previously? Is there such a thing as damage to the heart that has no effect on performance, particularly the incredibly demanding kinds of performances that sports like professional basketball require?

reggedtorespond• 4 years ago

They haven't all. Look up Asia Durr if you want an anecdote. #2 draft pick for WBNA and hasn't played since her rookie season due to long haul covid effects.

I am not aware of any study on covid in athletes in particular, though.

throwawaycities3• 4 years ago

To your second question, yes, heart inflammation doesn’t mean they can’t participate, participate at a high level, or that the athlete even notices any issue. It means they have heart inflammation which carries associated risks both long term and acute. If you are looking for anecdotal evidence, there are plenty of athletes that talk about post covid struggles that include a range of issues impacting performance (i.e. reduced cardio, more labored breathing, brain fog).

wolverine8769• 4 years ago

how come they all are invariably coming back to the same exact performance they had previously?

What is that based on? It wouldn't be hard to study, given the statistics already available.

okaramian• 4 years ago

I think this post lacks an understanding of heart conditions. You can have an enlarged heart or other heart issues and still be a professional athlete. Ask Reggie Lewis. It took Jason Tatum many months to get back to some kind of playing condition after he contracted Covid, etc.

https://www.nbcsports.com/boston/celtics/celtics-star-jayson...

tremon• 4 years ago

Some cyclists even survive cancer, and then come back to a higher level of performance than they had previously. Does that mean there is such a thing as a cancer that has a positive effect on athletic performance?

To keep on the topic of cyclists:

Tim DeClerq - out for months after being diagnosed with pericarditis after Covid infection.

Sonny Colbrelli - suffered cardiac arrest yesterday after his race, two months after Covid infection.

timr3• 4 years ago

It's worth saying that all of Al-Aly's papers so far have had the same basic structure, and the same basic problems: they take a population of older, sicker people (veteran's administration data), compare to some synthetic, non-randomized control group (this is where the "study of 15M" comes from), then extrapolate from that comparison to everyone. This is problematic for a few reasons:

* the older, sicker population is simply not representative of the population at large. No amount of normalization or adjustment can truly fix this.

* Moreover, the normalization process creates a "modeling problem" -- it's too easy for the researcher to find whatever outcome he's seeking by mucking with the weightings. With methods like this, you have to be very careful interpreting the results, because tiny details in the methods matter a lot.

* the signals in the data often are smaller in magnitude than the covariates in the study population (e.g. finding an X% difference in thing Y, when the population is more than X% sicker, overall)

* Use of ICD (medical billing) codes for a study like this is fraught. Choice of codes can create/remove a small signal in the data, and yet, it's not always clear that certain codes should be used (basic example: do you use the ICD code for a bypass graft as a "cardiac event" in a study like this? Almost certainly, a heart bypass surgery reflects a life-long problem, not an acute event due to Covid.) Again, methods matter a great deal here.

* Al-Aly is...less than transparent...about the size of the observed effect and its dependence on age and health. Often these details are buried in supplemental materials, and then he goes in the news media and makes bombastic claims about something "even happening in younger populations", based on a relatively weak effect size extrapolated in younger, healthy people.

* Relatively strong claims are made about small differences in outcome. For example, I just saw one last night from Al-Aly that turned a 13 per 1000 difference in outcome (1.3%), into a breathless claim of "over 40% increased risk". Mathematically true, perhaps, but utterly misleading (also, the difference was observed primarily in the oldest people, so the citing mean difference was simply wrong).

I could go on. Point is, please don't take this study as definitive. This is one paper, and Al-Aly has an agenda.

SnowProblem• 4 years ago

We should expect some heart damage because it happens after the flu too, but this study is flawed. If you had covid but weren't tested, you were put into the control group, meaning the conclusions they draw (ie. 5% increase in heart problems after a year) are going to be higher than in reality.

fallingknife2• 4 years ago

This chart from the actual paper contains much more useful information than the linked article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3/figures/5

Basically, don't worry about this if you were not hospitalized with covid.

Whole paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3

zuminator• 4 years ago

I'd be curious to know how the numbers compare other infections generally. This page [0] leads me to conclude that all types of infections, even the common cold, often affect the heart adversely. Are Covid's effects on the heart more severe than other studied viruses, or is this really just business as usual, the main difference being the comparatively widespread nature of the Covid virus?

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/myocarditis/s...

EricE4• 4 years ago

It will be interesting to see the long term numbers for this on the vaxxed vs. unvaxxed.

Fargoan5• 4 years ago

My friend died 2 days ago. Heart attack at 31 years old. He had some unhealthy eating habits, but nothing out of the ordinary and he was at most slightly overweight. I wouldn't be surprised if him having covid a couple months ago was a major factor in his death.

melling• 4 years ago

Was the person vaccinated? This was done before people were vaccinated so it’s unclear if being vaccinated helped:

“THIS STUDY WAS DONE BEFORE VACCINATION WAS WIDELY AVAILABLE.”

bsdetector• 4 years ago

The study, if I found the right one, has tables where they compare myocarditis in Covid patients to non-vaccinated by excluding data after vaccination, 62% of Covid patients and 56% of non-covid group excluded, to show that Covid itself caused damage.

I would hardly call half of data coming from vaccinated people "before widely available".

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3

Also an interesting bit, myocarditis hazard ratio for covid-infected by non-hospital / hospital / ICU vs:

Contemporary: 3.47 / 12.13 / 35.57

Historical: 5.67 / 19.82 / 58.11

The other outcomes were basically identical between contemporary and historical. I wonder what caused higher levels of mycarditis in half-vaccinated, uninfected contemporary group? That is a tough one.

Fargoan5• 4 years ago

He was vaccinated. Pfizer iirc. Not sure if he got a booster

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

Seems unlikely. Usually something as drastic as a heart attack at a young age like that is linked to genetics.

parrellel• 4 years ago

Very possible, there was a teen girl who was recovering from Covid around here a month ago that just hemorrhaged to death. Cardiovascular damage continues to be no joke.

wolverine8769• 4 years ago

I'm very sorry about your friend. That's incredible - 31 years old. How heart-breaking it must be.

Fargoan5• 4 years ago

Thank you. It's a shock to everyone. Been a weird week

IAmGraydon• 4 years ago

Young people who are seemingly healthy do die of heart attacks from time to time. This happened before Covid. If we're picking random things preceding his death, why not some other thing he did in the last couple of months? Why Covid?

Fargoan5• 4 years ago

Why covid? Because covid causes cardiovascular damage. Travis was seemingly at least as healthy as the average American. He was physically active, going to the gym a couple times a week. Played softball in the summers. 31 is so young. My layman's assessment of my friend's death is that stress, covid, genetics are probably the things that came together to suddenly end his life.

sjg007• 4 years ago

Because covid causes heart damage and is ubiquitous in the community.

LouisSayers• 4 years ago

Unfortunately these things happen sometimes.

Unless you investigate though it's all pure speculation.

Here's a pro athlete that also died (at age 33) - riding his bike up a hill.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/76467759/kiwi-mount...

tucosan• 4 years ago

Has anyone found a quantification of the HR for vaccinated vs non-vaccinated patients in the study?

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

So basically everyone who has had COVID (presumably even the "milder" Omicron variant family, although we seem to be permanently stuck on the name Omicron, so the association with "mildness" probably won't last forever) has heart damage, that could last for a year or more? Oh boy.

Covid and the Heart: It Spares No One – Johns Hopkins

Related Stories