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

publichealth.jhu.edu

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

#31

Post by bigfudge »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #23
kragen wrote: post #11

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…

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 p…

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.

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

#32

Post by Daishiman »

vikingerik wrote: post #18
exo-pla-net wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

95% is not a "vast majority"; that's 5% of the population with quantifiable degradation in heart function. I fear for the catastrophe it will cause 20 years down the line in increased disease burden.

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

#33

Post by exo-pla-net »

vikingerik wrote: post #18
exo-pla-net wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Near-certainty is literally the finding of the linked article. You're confusing your numbers. Heart damage != heart attacks.

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

#34

Post by anamax »

andrew_ wrote: post #27
anamax wrote: post #22

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.

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...

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.

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

#35

Post by thelettere »

throwawaycities wrote: post #25

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 t…

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?

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

#36

Post by jah242 »

kragen wrote: post #11

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…

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.

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

#37

Post by margalabargala »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #23
kragen wrote: post #11

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…

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 p…

> 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.

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

#38

Post by Retric »

bigfudge wrote: post #31
exo-pla-net wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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.

Lingering symptoms isn’t a useful diagnostic tool in this case. Hart damage is generally invisible up until people have a significant problem. This is why young marathon runners occasionally die of undiagnosed heart problems and the elderly get in depth testing before voluntary medical procedures.

Hypothetically, if 3/4 of population has the baseline risk and 1/4 the population has 8x the risk then you could say most people are at identical risks. But unless you can determine which population someone was in that’s irrelevant.

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

#39

Post by TrevorJ »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #23
kragen wrote: post #11

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…

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 p…

>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.

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

#40

Post by xorfish »

kragen wrote: post #11

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…

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