12 percent of corona patients develop heart problems • Trump tours fans

Nearly 12 percent of corona patients admitted to hospital experience heart complications such as cardiac arrhythmias. 7 percent of them will develop a pulmonary embolism. This is evident from an international registration of 3,011 patients in mainly Dutch hospitals. The study, to be published later this month, shows that about a third of critically ill patients already had cardiovascular disease before hospitalization. The mean age of the patients studied is 67 years. More than 60 percent of them were male.

Irregular heartbeat is common with old age and other infectious diseases. Research leader, Folkert Asselbergs of UMC Utrecht, puts the results into perspective. “We were afraid that there would be a lot of inflammation of the heart muscle, there are hardly any. If you look at the numbers themselves, we think it is not that bad.”

The results of the research come from the so-called Capacity-register, in which hospitals can record medical data about corona patients. This registration is an initiative of UMC Utrecht and was co-developed by, among others, the Heart Foundation and the Dutch Association for Intensive Care. More than seventy hospitals from thirteen countries are now participating in the project, including Belgium, Great Britain, Spain and Egypt.

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