Study: COVID causes more ‘broken hearts’
In these pandemic-swept times, most people are swimming in stress as they face uncertainty about what’s coming and how it will affect them. Now a new study says this stress can show up as a heart attacklike condition in some people, and local experts said that’s not a surprise.
Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study out of the Cleveland Clinic showing a significant spike in patients with stress cardiomyopathy, also known as broken heart syndrome, during the pandemic. The condition carries many of the same symptoms as a heart attack, including chest pain, shortness of breath and, in some cases, irregular heartbeat.
The findings didn’t come as a shock to Dr. Daniel Jacoby, director of the Comprehensive Heart Failure Program at Yale New Haven Hospital.
“We know stress interacts with the cardiac system in a variety of ways,” he said. “Stress is cumulative. So, if your baseline stress is higher, (an event causing) acute stress could make it worse.”
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic definitely could be increasing people’s stress levels, Jacoby said.
“There are a lot of unknowns right now, and unknowns tend to cause stress,” he said.
The Cleveland Clinic study seems to support this theory. For the project, cardiologists examined 258 patients who came into the Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland Clinic Akron General with certain heart symptoms between March 1 and
April 30. Those patients — all of whom tested negative for COVID-19 — were compared with four control groups of similar patients prior to the pandemic.
The researchers found that about 7.8 percent of those in the pandemic-era group were diagnosed with stress cardiomyopathy, compared with a pre-pandemic incidence of 1.7 percent.
Patients who came down with “broken heart syndrome” during the pandemic also were more likely to have a longer hospital stay than their pre-pandemic counterparts. However, there wasn’t a significant difference in deaths between the two groups.
Stress cardiomyopathy is something Stuart Zarich, chief of cardiology at Bridgeport Hospital, has studied for a while. He said, in most cases, the illness is less dangerous than a heart attack and “most patients recover 100 percent” in a few days. However, he said, there are some rare cases where stress cardiomyopathy can be fatal.
Heart disease in general has been a major concern during the pandemic, and not just because heart patients are at higher risk for COVID-19 complications, Zarich said. He said many people have avoided going to doctor’s offices and hospitals when they suspect cardiac symptoms, because they are afraid of getting sick.
Zarich said if patients have chest pains, shortness of breath and other heart symptoms, they have to seek care. “It’s got to be checked out,” he said. “By not going to the doctor, you will increase your chances of dying of cardiac disease”