Why the study?
The effect of COVID-19 infection on the cardiac conduction system was not well established, with only a few previous case reports describing complete heart block in these patients.
Does COVID-19 infection cause complete heart block?
Does COVID-19 infection cause complete heart block?
COVID-19 infection can transiently affect the cardiac conduction system, leading to spontaneously recovering complete heart block.
Transient complete heart block may follow COVID-19; case series leaves open causality and warrants prospective confirmation before practice change.
Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) has led to a global pandemic and has been the center of attention across the entire medical community. This novel virus was initially thought to affect primarily the respiratory system, but now it is evident that it has a multitude of effects on the human body. Our point of interest is to establish the effect of COVID-19 infection on the conducting system of the heart. We present a case series of four patients who developed complete heart block (CHB) shortly after being infected with COVID-19 without any previous known risk factors of complete heart block. There have only been a few previous case reports on the occurrence of CHB in COVID-19 patients highlighting the importance and the need of our case series to the literature of cardiovascular outcomes in COVID-19 patients. Our case series highlight that COVID-19 can indeed affect the conduction system of the heart and cause CHB in patients who then recovered spontaneously further elucidating the transient nature of cardiovascular effects caused by the novel virus.
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Sharif et al. (2021) studied this question.
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