Published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Drs. Weinsaft and Kim have shown that an echocardiogram is a useful tool in evaluating COVID-19 patients who have damage to the heart’s right ventricle.
Dr. Jonathan Weinsaft, Professor of Medicine, and Dr. Jiwon Kim, Associate Professor of Medicine, both cardiologists in the Division of Cardiology, WDOM, believe their study is first to show that damage to the heart’s right ventricle is an independent predictor of COVID-19 mortality risk. Furthermore, compared to other risk factors, they found that right heart dysfunction was an even stronger predictor than the other factors. A beneficial conclusion from this study suggests that physicians should consider using an echocardiogram (noninvasive tool) to discover such damage to the heart’s right ventricle.
Note: This study involved 510 COVID-19 patients (covering multiple ethnicities); median age of patients was 64 and two-thirds were male. The patients had been admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian/Lower Manhattan, or NewYork-Presbyterian Queens and received echocardiograms from mid-March to mid-May. The research included a broad collaboration between investigators in cardiology, general internal medicine and biostatistics at Weill Cornell Medicine, and leveraged an institutional registry developed by Drs. Monika Safford and Parag Goyal.
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Transthoracic two-dimensional color Doppler echocardiography. Credit: Shutterstock.