Per Editor: Li Zedong
On October 5, the topic of "the new crown virus may directly affect the DNA of the heart" was at the top of the hot search.
According to Xinhua News Agency reported on October 5, the University of Queensland in Australia recently released news that a new study revealed how the new crown virus affects the heart, and its difference with the influenza virus on the heart, which provides ideas for treating heart damage caused by the new crown virus infection.
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Experts: The new crown virus may have a direct impact on the DNA of the heart
The study, led by the University of Queensland, has been published in the monthly journal Immunology. One of the study's authors, Dr Kulasinghar of the University of Queensland, said: "COVID-19 has led to more severe and long-term cardiovascular disease than the 2009 influenza pandemic, but at the molecular level, what factors contributed to this phenomenon is unclear."
According to reports, the new study used heart tissue samples taken from the remains of 7 new crown patients, 2 influenza patients and 6 control patients for analysis.
The results showed that the researchers found strong inflammation on heart samples from flu patients, while tissue changes related to DNA damage and repair were found in heart samples of COVID-19 patients. The researchers say the coronavirus is likely to have a direct impact on the heart's DNA, rather than just a knock-on effect by triggering inflammation.
Pedestrians pass by a COVID-19 testing point in Times Square, New York, on May 17, 2022. (Photo by Xinhua reporter Wang Ying)
Cullasingha said DNA damage and repair mechanisms cause genome instability and are linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative diseases.
John Fraser, a professor at the University of Queensland, said the study showed that the new coronavirus and the flu virus had different effects on heart tissue, which provided more evidence that the new coronavirus was not "similar to the flu virus". In the future, the team hopes to conduct in-depth investigations through larger cohort studies.
Nature: The risk of cardiovascular disease may increase after infection with the new crown, and the risk of severe illness increases by at least 20 times
According to the network, on August 2, the top international scientific journal "Nature" published an article titled "Risk of Heart Disease after the New Coronavirus: What the Data Illustrates", saying that even after several months of recovery, the risk of cardiovascular problems such as heart disease or stroke is still high.
In a research paper released this year, researchers used data from 150,000 COVID-19 patients and uninfected peers recorded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to estimate how often the coronavirus causes cardiovascular problems and try to understand which groups of patients are at greatest risk of cardiovascular disease, the duration of the risk, and what causes these symptoms.
The results found that in the year after the patient was infected with the new crown virus, the risk of 20 cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke increased significantly. The researchers also say that even patients who have fully recovered from mild infections can even experience these complications.
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The study showed that patients with severe COVID-19 had a significant increase in their risk of cardiovascular disease over the next year, with at least 20-fold increased risk for cardiovascular diseases such as swollen hearts and thrombosis in the lungs compared to their uninfected peers. In addition, the risk of COVID-19 patients who have not been hospitalized has also increased. For example, the rate of heart attacks increased by 8% and the rate of inflammation of the heart increased by 247%.
According to Ziyad Al-Aly, a professor of epidemiology at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study, there is growing evidence that the new crown virus may permanently alter the physical health of some groups. According to Nature, these changes fall within the category of acute COVID-19 sequelae, which also cover some of the long-term COVID-19 symptoms. Some other previous studies have shown that the new crown virus may increase the risk of long-term diseases, such as diabetes, persistent lung damage and even brain damage.
In addition, some other studies are pointing in the same direction as the previous studies. For example, a study in the UK showed that patients hospitalized for COVID-19 infection were about 3 times more likely to face major cardiovascular problems within 8 months of hospitalization than those who were not infected; Another study in the UK found that within 4 months of infection, the risk of congestive heart failure in COVID-19 patients also increased by about 2.5 times.
However, despite the large scale of the aforementioned studies, there are some limitations. The study is observational in nature, which means that data collected for other purposes are reused, and this approach may have some cognitive biases.
Eric Topol, a genomics expert at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, also acknowledged the study's limitations and believes more research is needed before scientists can actually quantify how often cardiovascular problems occur.
Daily Economic News Comprehensive Xinhua News Agency, Every Economic Network (Reporter Wen Qiao)
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