How does Covid-19 affect your heart?
Find out how Covid-19 can lead to conditions such as blood clots, heart damage, palpitations and high heart rate.
In April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, the BHF joined forces with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to prioritise and support research into Covid-19.
We wanted to know as quickly as possible why people with heart and circulatory diseases are more at risk of getting seriously ill from Covid-19, how Covid-19 affects the heart and blood vessels, and how the pandemic was indirectly affecting the care of people with heart and circulatory conditions.
Seven “flagship projects” – research projects which were prioritised because of their importance to the fight against Covid-19 - were selected through this partnership. These include projects trying to understand the extent of organ damage caused by Covid-19, or using artificial intelligence to monitor the risk of long-term effects of the virus on heart and blood vessel health. Together these projects will shed new light on the links between Covid-19 and heart and circulatory diseases.
By awarding flagship status to a handful of projects, we aimed to mobilise resources and research effort behind studies that have the best chance of swiftly improving care and saving lives. The speed at which this happened is testament to the strength of UK cardiovascular science.
Linking UK patient datasets to study the links between Covid-19 and heart and circulatory disease
One of the projects awarded flagship status was CVD-COVID-UK, led by Professor Cathie Sudlow, Director of the BHF Data Science Centre. This partnership aims to link up UK healthcare datasets, such as patient data from hospitals and primary care, and make this data available to researchers in a secure and anonymised way to help answer important questions about the links between Covid-19 and heart and circulatory disease.
The BHF Data Science Centre also works with the Strategic Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and regularly provides SAGE with updates on the health data research relating to Covid-19.
In December 2020, the consortium published findings of a study looking at records from nine UK hospitals. They found that the number of people being hospitalised due to heart and circulatory diseases, or having procedures to treat these conditions (such as coronary bypass surgery) dropped by up to 88% in the first UK lockdown, between late March and early May 2020. This study provided important evidence of the indirect impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on heart and circulatory disease care and highlighted a need to develop ways to ensure such dramatic reductions and delays do not happen in the future.
First published 1st June 2021
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