Researchers have found that Kovid-19 infection damages heart tissue. The discovery will now help experts design better treatments for the condition. The study is published in the journal Immunology. The study used real heart tissue collected during autopsies from seven Brazilian COVID-19 patients, two people who died of influenza and six control patients.
The study found that Covid-19 damages DNA in heart tissue, which was not detected in influenza samples. Notably, the researchers also found that both COVID-19 and influenza are serious respiratory viruses, but they affect heart tissue very differently.
“Compared to the 2009 flu pandemic, COVID caused more severe and long-lasting heart disease, but what caused it at the molecular level was not known,” said Arutha Kulasinghe from the University of Queensland, Australia.
“During our study, we could not detect viral particles in the heart tissue of COVID-19 patients, but what we found were tissue changes associated with DNA damage and repair,” Kulsinghe said.
The researchers said that DNA damage and repair mechanisms are related to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative disorders, so it is important to understand why this is happening in Covid-19 patients.
Data on the impact of COVID-19 on the heart have previously been limited to blood biomarkers and physiological measurements, as obtaining heart biopsy samples is invasive.
The findings provided insight into how COVID-19 affected the body in comparison to other respiratory viruses.
“When we looked at influenza cardiac tissue samples, we found that it caused more inflammation,” said Professor John Fraser, who founded the International COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium.
“While we found that COVID-19 attacked the DNA of the heart – perhaps directly and not just as a knock-off from inflammation,” Fraser said.
The study highlights that the two viruses affect heart tissue very differently, which the researchers want to better understand in larger group studies.
“What we have clearly shown is that COVID is not ‘like the flu,'” Fraser said.
“This study helps us understand how COVID-19 affects that heart, and is the first step in working out which treatments might be best to repair that heart,” he said.
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