440 - "It Really Spared No One"—Covid-19's Long-term Heart Problems
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Two years into the pandemic, we now have more data about how COVID affects people in the long term. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, Chief of Research and Education Service at Veterans Affairs in the St. Louis Health Care System talks with Stephanie Desmon about an expansive new study of 11 million people who had COVID-19. The study found that people with COVID are at higher risk for all kinds of heart issues including clots, inflammation, and arrhythmias even a year after having mild or asymptomatic COVID—risks that persisted even in relatively healthy people.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.2 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call, and today Stephanie Desmond |
| 0:46.7 | talks to Saeed Al-Ali, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Washington University |
| 0:52.6 | in St. Louis. They discuss COVID-19 and the heart, |
| 0:56.5 | including his recent study, which found a significant risk of heart problems in people a year |
| 1:02.1 | after being diagnosed with COVID. Let's listen. Ziyadh al-Ali. Thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:08.6 | Well, thank you for having me. Delighted to be with you. |
| 1:13.8 | So today we want to talk about COVID and the heart. |
| 1:21.4 | So we've known for a while that people with COVID can develop heart issues like clots and inflammation and arrhythmia. |
| 1:30.5 | You just published a new study that says that in some people, these symptoms can persist for a year or more. So what does this mean? |
| 1:36.9 | And what did you study? So we've known for a while that COVID-19 in the acute phase in the first 30 days, especially in people really need to be admitted to the hospital, had severe disease and need to be |
| 1:41.4 | admitted to the hospital or need to be in the ICU, you know, they may |
| 1:45.2 | develop complications and some of them could be heart complications. |
| 1:48.5 | But what we didn't really know is that what happened to people's heart in the long term, |
| 1:53.2 | what happens to people's heart, you know, six months out and even a year out. |
| 1:57.6 | And most importantly, what happens to people who had mild disease and did not need to be |
| 2:02.3 | hospitalized, did not need to go into the hospital and did not need ICU care. So we did this |
... |
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