Heart Disease and Blood Clot Study Reveals Increased Risk for COVID Patients

In international COVID news, a medical study completed this month has found that even people who were never sick enough to need hospitalization have an increased risk of developing blood clots and heart disease. According to Bloomberg news, the chances of a heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event in the first 12 months of COVID recovery increase with the severity of the initial illness.  And while that study is US-based, News Five checked in with a doctor who has been providing reliable information to Belizeans during our own struggle with COVID. Internist Dr. Fernando Cuellar told us today that while the study results are grave, there is glimmer of hope for some people because it is not everyone who survives COVID will develop these health conditions.

Dr. Fernando Cuellar

Dr. Fernando Cuellar, Internist

 “We thought that COVID was a condition that only affected your lungs, but lo and behold, we started realizing that it affects all the different organs of your body from your head to your toe. And as you rightly also mentioned, it seems to stimulate the blood clotting mechanism in your body. That is a big problem even with the lungs, noh? It creates small little clots – very small – all over the lungs and that affects the oxygen transfer in the lungs. So, it’s not just the virus affecting the lung tissue itself, causing inflammation and infection, but it also seems to cause a lot of generation of blood clots in the smaller blood vessels in the lungs, so that’s why people even have more trouble when it comes to the oxygenation. We also found out around that time that it can affect your heart, different parts of the heart; it can affect the heart muscle itself – something we call myocarditis – and damage the heart permanently; and it can also damage the covering of the heart, so we have pericarditis and we have myocarditis which is actually the heart tissue, the muscle tissue. It does sound worrisome but the offset to this, Marion is that the numbers are not all that great, thankfully. It’s not everybody who has suffered severe COVID will develop heart disease.”