Long COVID cardiac studies: More questions than answers.

BY ANISH KOKA The NIH recently announced $1.2 billion dollars in funding for research on Long COVID. This is in part because of a faction of scientists that have mined electronic health record databases to find evidence that the long term impacts of COVID on a variety of different organ systems is significant. I have some concerns when it comes to the cardiac complications discussed related to Long COVID. One of Dr. Al-Aly’s long COVID papers illustrates the issues with using large datasets to differentiate signal from noise. The authors used the US Department of Veterans Affairs national healthcare databases to build a cohort of 153,760 US veterans who survived the first 30 d of COVID-19 and two control groups: a contemporary cohort consisting of 5,637,647 users of the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) system with no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection and a historical cohort (pre-dating the COVID-19  pandemic)  consisting of  5,859,411 non-COVID-19-infected VHA users during 2017. These cohorts were followed longitudinally to estimate the risks and 12-month burdens of pre-specified incident cardiovascular outcomes in the overall cohort and according to care setting of the acute infection (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care). The question being asked here is: Does sars-cov2 result in downstream cardiovascular complications?  The authors attempted to assess cardiovascular disease in those with Sars-COV2, but to know if...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: COVID-19 Health Policy cardiac long covid studies NIH Source Type: blogs