Cardiovascular Complications in COVID-19 and Its Vaccines

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be a tremendous challenge to the medical community. The greatest challenge since the turn of the century. The authors summarized the main cardiovascular (CV) complications and mechanisms of COVID-19 and its vaccines. COVID-19 has lung tropism, but it has been reported to affect the CV system as well. The presence of comorbidities such as hypertension, CV disease, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease increased the risk of developing serious complications and in turn mortality significantly. The common CV complications include cardiac arrhythmia, myocardial infarction, myocarditis, and cardiac failure, which occurred in around 20% of all COVID-19 patients. The present difficulty in the diagnosis of CV complications were that COVID-19 symptoms often mimic CV events. Furthermore, the rapid diagnosis and management of serious CV events are sometimes overlooked due to COVID-19. Access to medical treatments were sometimes restricted due to the limited healthcare resources during the pandemic. The advent of various covid vaccines have reduced the number of these complications. However, CV events following mRNA vaccines or adenoviral vector vaccines are recognized as well as myocarditis and vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. With increasing experience in managing covid patients with CV complications, physicians are becoming better equipped in preventing, detecting, and treating these complications.