Coronavirus Patients Are Threatened To Die If They Have Respiratory Failures & Heart Diseases

If coronavirus patients die, they will certainly die of the irrefutable infection. However, scientists of a study pointed out that those who got a heart attack, multiple organ failure, septic shock or respiratory failure will fail to survive after testing positive for coronavirus.

Director of New Delhi's Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology Dr. Anurag Agrawal said:

"Covid-19 kills by respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, just like any other severe pneumonia. The difference is lack of immunity (against the new virus) and greater severity (of infection)."

A fatality of one of the coronavirus patients happened earlier this week when a 78-year-old Italian woman was dead because of a heart attack. She had been admitted to the Medanta hospital in Gurugram to treat COVID-19 and tested negative for the virus. However, heart disease still took her away from the world on Thursday.

A couple of weeks back, other Italians from the woman's group were discharged from the hospital after recovering. Chairman of the hospital Dr. Yatin Mehta shared:

"She died of multi-organ failure following a cardiac arrest, her kidney function was deranged when she was admitted to the hospital, and she was close to 80 years old; the mortality rate in such people with Sars-CoV-2 infection os close to 15%. The cause of death was COVID-19 because persistent infection is what led to the multi-organ failure."

From the data of many countries around the world, there are three diseases at the top dangerous factors leading to coronavirus patients' deaths including chronic lung disease, cardiovascular problems, and diabetes. In China, almost the casualties of 44,672 people who were studied particularly had at least one of those health issues.

In the US, from February 12 to March 28, hospital records' analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control showed that 78% of coronavirus patients in ICUs and 71% of hospitalized people owned at least one underlying health problems while the patients who didn't need to be hospitalized covered only 27%.

Vulnerable heart

Wuhan studies said that one of five infected cases had signs of heart disease. On April 11, The Lancet's editor-in-chief Richard Horton commented that doctors have to monitor the treatment for patients who got cardiovascular issues.

Meanwhile, Indian experts confirmed to explain heart damage for many reasons. President of the Public Health Foundation of India and former head of cardiology at New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Dr. K Srinath Reddy stated:

"This could be because of causes ranging from acute cor pulmonale (heart working harder to pump blood as oxygen levels fall because of lung tissue freezing); heart muscles suffering hypoxic damage, leading to depressed function, and arrhythmias (irregular heartbeat), viral myocarditis (inflammation after virus directly invades heart cells); and possible rise in thrombosis (blood clots)."

As per a study from the journal JAMA Cardiology, in the time of the influenza spread, people are dead due to heart diseases more than from pneumonia. The New England Journal of Medicine's study in 2018 also indicated that when someone is infected with flu, their heart attacks will rise nearly sixfold.

Lung chronic disease

One of the European Respiratory Journal's studies said:

"There is an increased ACE2 expression in airways of current (but not former) smokers and those with COPD... while the upregulation of ACE2 may be useful in protecting the host against acute lung injury, it predisposes them to increased risk of coronavirus infections, which uses this receptor to gain entrance into epithelial cells. This may in part explain the increased risk of viral respiratory tract infection in active smokers and virus-related exacerbations in those with COPD."

Protein connection

Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is a surface protein covering many cells in the body's key locations such as the respiratory tract, heart, immune regulation, and gastrointestinal tract. ACE inhibitors also include patients of heart disease or hypertension. Dr. Reddy said:

"The current consensus is that if people are already taking these medications, they should stay on them but they must consult their physicians. Depending on the severity of the infection and the clinical status of the patient, the medication may need to be modified."