People with heart ailments need to be careful in these times of Covid19 infection says cardiologist Dr Rathin Chakraborty

Eminent cardiologist, Prof.Dr. Rabin Chakraborty, who is also Chairman, Health Committee,The Bengal Chamber, explained how cardiac patients can be affected by Covid-19 infection and how they can take care of their heart in this critical period.

Accordng to the Dr Chakraborty, coronavrus Covid-19 may affect the heart in several ways.

He said, "Tthe heart can be directly affected by COVID-19  infection though possibility of that happening is very less, not more than three to four per cent."

According to the doctor, for those who already have some heart ailment, if they get the COVID-19 infection,, the possibility of complication is more; if heart gets badly affected  and has acute cardiac injury, there are chances of cardiogenic shock, which might ultimately give rise to complications and lmay even lead to death.

Excerpt from Dr Chakraborty's interview:

"If the heart is inflamed because of myocarditis, it first doesn't affect the heart; that happens only after lungs and other organs are affected and the percentage of that happening is very less. 

If heart muscles get inflamed which happens from myocarditis , from which erythema might arise and from it might arise acute heart injury or acute cardiac injury. For those individuals who already have some heart related ailment or problem like diabetes mellitus, blood pressure, stroke or previous heart attack history or history of bypass surgery, for them the risk of complications  is much more.

For those elderly people having diabetes, blood pressure, smoking history, it is often seen that for COVID-19 infection usual symptoms like fever, cough occur and subsequently pneumonia; they suddenly develop a pain in chest that might seem like a heart attack. At that time doing an ECG would reveal an ECG like that of heart attack or cardiac enzyme troponin test CPK-MB, which is many times high. So this might be misdiagnosed as heart attack.and wrong medication would be given,. But in actuality it is not heart attack but COVID-19 infection . Because in many instances for such types of patients silently after minor fever and cough it suddenly happens that the patient feels the primary symptoms or signs of heart ailment.

We intake various medicines and drugs, for example, for blood pressure. There have been discussions whether they aggravate Corona virus infection which is not completely right. but many say because of Prophylaxis Hydroxychloroquine when taken by them, we need to let people know that for those patients with primary abnormality in ECG like long qt syndrome, if there is no test done, such people are advised to take Hydroxychloroquine or if they themselves take Hydroxychoroquine, if one doesn't find any abnormality in ECG, it might worsen the situation."