E-Mail
A new study looking at how COVID-19 affects people with asthma provides reassurance that having the condition doesn t increase the risk of severe illness or death from the virus.
George Institute for Global Health researchers in Australia analysed data from 57 studies with an overall sample size of 587,280. Almost 350,000 people in the pool had been infected with COVID-19 from Asia, Europe, and North and South America and found they had similar proportions of asthma to the general population.
The results, published in the peer-reviewed
Journal of Asthma, show that just over seven in every 100 people who tested positive for COVID-19 also had asthma, compared to just over eight in 100 in the general population having the condition. They also showed that people with asthma had a 14 percent lower risk of acquiring COVID-19 and were significantly less likely to be hospitalized with the virus.
Around 50% of patients who have been hospitalised with severe COVID-19 and who show raised levels of a protein called troponin have damage to their hearts. The injury was detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans at least a month after discharge, according to new findings published in the European Heart Journal. It is is the largest study to date to investigate convalescing COVID-19 patients who had raised troponin levels indicating a possible problem with the heart.
In an analysis of information on 448 patients with heart failure who were discharged from a hospital in Sweden, 20.3% of patients were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and 60.9% were readmitted within 1 year. The ESC Heart Failure analysis found that most of the patients who needed to be rehospitalized were readmitted for heart failure.
Researchers using MRI have found significant abnormalities in the eyes of some people with severe COVID-19, according to a new study. The study results support the need for eye screening in these patients to provide appropriate treatment and management of potentially severe ophthalmological manifestations of COVID-19.