Why does COVID-19 damage vascular beds?

Why does COVID-19 damage vascular beds? - Published Jan 11, 2023

Good video in the link

Peter Libby, MD, a cardiovascular medicine specialist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, explains his research into COVID-19 and how it damages the endothelium on blood vessels. This has been implicated as the primary cause of thrombosis in COVID patients, and the possible cause of many post-COVID sequelae symptoms.

He presented on mechanism for COVID's proclivity for vascular beds at the 2022 American Heart Association (AHA) meeting. Libby has been a major researcher in the role of inflammation in vascular diseases, and early on saw COVID-19 as a vascular disease as much as it is a respiratory virus.

"At the outset of COVID-19, everyone thought it was just pneumonia, but even if you look at the early data from the outbreak in Wuhan, China, a substantial minority of patients had cardiovascular involvement," Libby said. "It is not just pneumonia, it is a cardiovascular disease."

The SARS-CoV-2 virus causes thrombosis throughout the body and has caused issues with the heart in the form of myocarditis, pericarditis and arrhythmias. The clotting issues can manifest as heart attacks, stroke, pulmonary embolism, organ ischemia or infarcts and deep vein thrombosis (DVT).

Libby said the big question has been what is the cause of the clotting and cardiac issues and how to address these issues in both acute and long-COVID phases.

"The best evidence we have today by my read is that this is not caused by a direct infection with a cytopathic connection to the virus in the myocardial cell, but an effect largely on the blood vessels," Libby explained.