Thomas Maddox, MD: Cardiac Phenomenon of COVID-19

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has undoubtedly altered medicine, both in the short- and long-term.

While the pandemic has wreaked havoc on health care systems and practitioners alike, it has ushered in an era of information-sharing that most either never expected or would take years to develop.

Still, even with this rapid shift in the dissemination of information, there remains mountains of answered questions related to COVID-19 and its impact—particularly in cardiology.

Debate has raged in journals, as well as on social media, as to how COVID-19 affects cardiovascular health and how knowledge of the exact mechanism could aid in treatment. Early data from China and other hotspots have established SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors in the lungs and while this has contributed to our knowledge of the disease, researchers and clinicians have yet to understand the cardiac phenomenon.

Making the need for understanding even more urgent, some of the latest data indicates COVID-19 patients are at an increased risk of thrombosis as a result of the disease.

For more on how COVID-19 impacts the cardiovascular system and what cardiologists should know, HCPLive® caught up with Thomas Maddox, MD, professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine and chair of the American College of Cardiology, for his insights.