More than 1 in 5 patients develop heart damage as a result of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, one small study published March 27 in the journal JAMA Cardiology suggested. While some of these patients have a history of heart conditions, others do not. So what's going on?Cardiologists say several scenarios could be unfolding: The heart may struggle to pump blood in the absence of enough oxygen; the virus may directly invade heart cells; or the body, in its attempt to eradicate the virus, may mobilize a storm of immune cells that attack the heart."We know that this is not the only virus that affects the heart," said Dr. Mohammad Madjid, an assistant professor at McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The risk of developing heart attacks, for example, is thought to increase about sixfold when a person is infected with the flu virus, according to a study published in 2018 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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