Myocardial Involvement in COVID-19: an Interaction Between Comorbidities and Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction. A Further Indication of the Role of Inflammation

Purpose of the review: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and cardiovascular (CV) disease have a close relationship that emerged from the earliest reports. The aim of this review is to show the possible associations between COVID-19 and heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF).

Recent findings: In hospitalized patients with COVID-19, the prevalence of HFpEF is high, ranging from 4 to 16%, probably due to the shared cardio-metabolic risk profile. Indeed, comorbidities including hypertension, diabetes, obesity and chronic kidney disease - known predictors of a severe course of COVID-19 - are major causes of HFpEF, too. COVID-19 may represent a precipitating factor leading to acute decompensation of HF in patients with known HFpEF and in those with subclinical diastolic dysfunction, which becomes overt. COVID-19 may also directly or indirectly affect the heart. In otherwise healthy patients, echocardiographic studies showed that the majority of COVID-19 patients present diastolic (rather than systolic) impairment, pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular dysfunction. Such abnormalities are observed both in the acute or subacute phase of COVID-19. Cardiac magnetic resonance reveals myocardial inflammation and fibrosis in up to the 78% of patients in the chronic phase of the disease. These findings suggest that COVID-19 might be a novel independent risk factor for the development of HFpEF, through the activation of a systemic pro-inflammatory state. Follow-up studies are urgently needed to better understand long-term sequelae of COVID-19 inflammatory cardiomyopathy.