Just over a year after receiving a double-lung transplant, a COVID-19 survivor is cycling 38-miles to raise funds for the nonprofit where he found support after his surgery.
Rick Bressler, Lock Haven, contracted the COVID-19 virus in March 2021, four days before he was scheduled to receive the vaccine. He was soon hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. Read the full story in NorthcentralPA.com.
PHILADELPHIA — The CV complications of COVID-19 are wide-ranging, and the consequences can be especially serious in patients with HF, a speaker said at the Heart in Diabetes CME conference.
The presentation by Lee R. Goldberg, MD, MPH, FACC, section chief of advanced cardiac failure and heart transplant, vice chair for medicine informatics and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, covered a number of topics related to cardiac complications of COVID-19. Read the full article in Healio.
Dennis Franklin thought he had come down with a cold when he was vacationing with his wife in Holden, Mo., in June 2021. Too tired to do anything, he cut the trip short.
Once home in St. Charles, Mo., he went to an urgent care center and was diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia. Two days later, on his wedding anniversary, he didn’t wake up. When his wife, Julia, tried to rouse him, she realized he was barely breathing. She frantically called 911 and an ambulance rushed him to the local hospital. Read the full story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.
— Mixed results in seven-study scoping review
The jury is still out as to whether diabetes is a risk factor for post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), a researcher reported.
In a scoping review of seven studies, three (43%) concluded that diabetes was indeed a “potent” risk factor for developing long COVID following infection, according to Jessica L. Harding, PhD, of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Read more in MedPage Today.
— Infection is likely headed toward seasonality, but it’s not there yet
COVID-19 may indeed become a seasonal illness with predictable patterns of infection — but it’s not there yet, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts say.
While the virus has had some element of seasonality since it first came into the world more than 2 years ago, other factors — including variant evolution, population immunity, and behavioral changes — have made seasonality less apparent. Read more in MedPage Today.
Kidney transplant recipients do not contract COVID-19 from accepting a kidney donation from a COVID-19-positive deceased donor, according to data published in the Journal of Urology.
In a retrospective review, the Cleveland Clinic transplant team examined data for 55 patients who received a kidney donation from 34 deceased donors with COVID-19 between February 2021 and October 2021. All donors tested positive for COVID-19 within a median of 4 days of organ donation. Read more in Healio.
In the third installment of a three-part video series, Heather Stefanski, MD, PhD, discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the National Marrow Donor Program/Be The Match.
“One of the common questions we received … is what to do when a donor tests positive for COVID-19,” Stefanski — vice president of medical services for National Marrow Donor Program/Be The Match — told Healio. Read more in Healio.
— Severity of kidney disease ups risk of ICU time, in-hospital mortality, and more
SAN DIEGO — Certain factors were highly predictive of severe COVID illness in hospitalized patients who had type 2 diabetes (T2D) and chronic kidney disease (CKD), a researcher reported.
In a single-center study of patients with T2D and CKD hospitalized with COVID-19 infection, having hyperglycemia upon admission was tied with more than a 10 times higher risk of severe COVID illness (OR 10.49, 95% CI 3.09-35.60), according to Ella Burguera-Couce, an MD candidate at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Read the complete article in MedPage Today.
Racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality persist in the U.S. among lung transplant recipients, according to data presented at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions.
“Our group was interested in trying to look at disparities and come up with ways of not only identifying but finding ways to intervene to decrease the disparities observed within the cardiac surgery population, which lung transplant recipients fall into,” Stanley B. Wolfe, MD, cardiac research fellow in surgery at the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Healio. “We know that the transplant population, whether it be lung, heart, kidney, etc., have very close follow-up compared to a standard patient, but they also are immunosuppressed, which increases your overall risk of getting severe COVID-19, as well as dying from COVID-19.” Read the full story in Healio.
Patients with antibody deficiencies demonstrated reduced immunogenicity following vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, according to a study published in Journal of Clinical Immunology.
These findings demonstrate the ongoing risk that the virus presents these patients, Adrian M. Shields, MBBS, MRCP, PhD, clinical lecturer at University of Birmingham Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy in the United Kingdom, and colleagues wrote.
Read more in Healio.