
COVID-19 can damage a person's heart even if the coronavirus does not directly infect heart tissue, new research has found.
The severe inflammation that COVID-19 causes in other organs, such as the lungs, appears to indirectly cause the heart damage associated with the infection, researchers report.
"After a COVID infection, the immune system can cause far-reaching damage to other organs by causing serious inflammation throughout the body — and that's in addition to the damage the virus itself has caused directly to lung tissue," he said in a press release. the author Dr. Matthais Nahrendorf, professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.
For the study, researchers analyzed heart tissue samples taken from 21 patients who died of COVID-related lung failure. These samples were compared with specimens from 33 patients who died of causes unrelated to COVID-19.