Study: Treated Covid-19 patients suffer lung damage 3 months after recovery
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 07-09-2020
Heart It
By the time of the next visit, which was after 12 weeks from discharge, symptoms among patients had improved, and lung damage was reduced to 56 per cent. While the third visit, after 24 weeks of being discharged from the hospital is still pending, Dr. Sabina Sahanic, a clinical PhD student at the University Clinic in Innsbruck and part of the team that carried out the study, said: "The bad news is that people show lung impairment from Covid-19 weeks after discharge," reported Dailymail.
However, she said that the good news is that it seems that the impairment tends to ameliorate over time, which could imply that lungs have a mechanism to repair themselves post the illness. At the six week visit, which was the first visit after being discharged, echocardiograms showed that 48 patients, which comprised of more than 58 per cent of the total, had dysfunction of the left ventricle of the heart at the point when it was relaxing and dilating.
Indicators of heart damage such as blood clots, inflammation, etc were also significantly high. However, these symptoms were observed to have a tendency to improve with time. According to Dr Sahanic, "Fortunately, in the Innsbruck cohort, we did not observe any severe coronavirus-associated heart dysfunction in the post-acute phase."