‘Carnage’ in a lab dish shows how coronavirus may damage hearts

IN LAB EXPERIMENTS, INFECTION OF HEART MUSCLE CELLS WITH SARS-COV-2 CAUSED LONG FIBERS TO BREAK APART INTO SMALL PIECES, SHOWN ABOVE. (GLADSTONE)

Covid-19, rightfully, has been cast as a respiratory infection, but research just posted to the preprint server bioRxiv suggests that the infection could also be a heart disease. That Covid-19 affects the heart is not new: This summer, doctors in Germany reported that 39 autopsies and cardiac MRIs of 100 Covid-19 patients showed damage to the heart, both in older people who died and younger people who didn't need hospital treatment for their infections. In the new study, when SARS-CoV-2 was added to human heart cells in a dish, researchers saw that long muscle fibers that help the heart beat had been diced into short bits. Gladstone Institutes' Bruce Conklin, a co-author of the study, describes the observation as “carnage in the human cells,” adding, "We should think about this as not only a pulmonary disease, but also potentially a cardiac one.” Read more here.