Coronavirus: Kidney and Heart Damage

As more and more people recover from COVID-19, there are studies that are looking into potential long-term health problems. I've looked at this in various other blog posts. If interested, you can read a couple other posts on the topic here and here. 

Let's explore additional articles that have come up around health problems for those who recover from the virus. 

CNBC (Aug 3) reported:

Approximately 10% to 50% of patients with severe Covid-19 that go into intensive care have kidney failure that requires some form of dialysis, the American Society of Nephrology Covid-19 Response Team reports.

At Mount Sinai 46% of patients that were admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic had some form of acute kidney injury; of those, 17% required urgent dialysis.

. . . Surprisingly, 82% of patients that got an acute kidney injury had no history of kidney issues; 18% did. More than a third of patients that survived did not recover the same kidney function they had before contracting the virus.

. . . The study, conducted Feb. 24–May 30, tracked a population of nearly 4,000 patients with a median age of 64.

An article from Science Magazine (Jul 31) does additional exploration into the topic of health problems:

One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. Data from the COVID Symptom Study, which uses an app into which millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden have tapped their symptoms, suggest 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. 

. . . [Raul Mitrani, a cardiac electrophysiologist and Jeffrey Goldberger, chief of cardiology -- both from the University of Miami], who co-authored a June paper in Heart Rhythm urging follow-up of patients who might have heart damage, worry in particular about the enzyme troponin, which is elevated in 20% to 30% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients and signifies cardiac damage.

. . . We expected to see a lot of long-term damage from COVID-19: scarring, decreased lung function, decreased exercise capacity,” says Ali Gholamrezanezhad, a radiologist at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who in mid-January began to review lung scans from COVID-19 patients in Asia. Hundreds of scans later, he has concluded that COVID-19 ravages the lungs less consistently and aggressively than SARS did, when about 20% of patients sustained lasting lung damage. “COVID-19 is in general a milder disease,” he says.

The Science Magazine article mentions studies that intend to track the health of survivors for up to 25 years. 

One good news from these quotes is that long-term lung damage seems unlikely, which I admit based on what I was reading  and watching on the topic felt like a distinct possibility. Of course, I do wonder about the definition of "severe," because later in the article Gholamrezanezhad is quoted as saying: Severe lung scarring appears less common than feared—Gholamrezanezhad knows of only one recovered patient who still needs oxygen at rest. I'm curious about this. Are there other patients potentially who don't need oxygen, but simply don't have the ability to exercise like they used to before they got COVID-19? The article doesn't seem to go into that. Based on what he said, it is less than 20% that have lasting lung damage, but is it 5% or 10%? 

The bad news is that instead of severe lung damage, you might have severe kidney or heart damage.   

I wrote a blog post back in March where I quoted a South China Morning Post article that stated: Dr Owen Tsang Tak-yin, medical director of the authority’s Infectious Disease Centre at Princess Margaret Hospital in Kwai Chung, said doctors had already seen around a dozen discharged patients in follow-up appointments. Two to three were unable to do things as they had in the past. Honestly, I just assumed this would be due to lung damage. Maybe it isn't lung damage, but heart damage that limits what people are able to do after recovery.

This is definitely a topic to keep an eye on, because not only is there a health consequence for individuals, but there are also financial consequences for governments, corporations, insurance, etc.