Heart attack – Aarogyapath Blog

Heart attack cases not rising due to Covid vaccine, but stress and other traditional factors, says cardiologist

Dr Mohit Gupta from GB Pant Hospital who was part of a new study published in the journal PLOS One, says Covid vaccine is in fact providing protection to heart.

The administration of Covid vaccines to a wide population across the globe has helped bring Coronavirus threat in control. While the virus continues to evolve and new variants are emerging, the symptoms are milder than early pandemic years. Irrespective of the role Covid vaccines played in controlling the spread of the virus, the reports of its side effects, especially its role in triggering heart attack is often debated by common people. A new observational study published in the journal PLOS One, determines the impact of Covid-19 vaccination on mortality following heart attack or acute myocardial infarction (AMI).

The study concludes that Covid vaccines Covishield and Covaxin do not pose as a risk factor for a heart attack and in fact have a protective effect on heart.

“The retrospective study used data from 1,578 people admitted to G B Pant hospital in Delhi between August 2021 and August 2022. As many as 1,086 (68.8 per cent) were vaccinated against COVID-19 while 492 (31.2 per cent) were unvaccinated,” reported PTI.

Among the vaccinated group, 1,047 (96 per cent) had received two doses of the vaccine while 39 (4 per cent) had received only a single dose.

“We analysed patients detected with heart attack in our set up. Many of them were vaccinated and some of them were not so retrospectively, we started analysing them and what we saw was very surprising. When these patients were taken for vaccination, the vaccine administration was absolutely safe, they didn’t have any significant side effects that could be linked to heart attack. It was concluded that there was no association between vaccine administration and occurrence of heart attack,” says Dr Mohit Gupta, Interventional Cardiologist and Professor of cardiology, who led the study, from G B Pant Hospital.

Dr Mohit added that they found that people who were vaccinated had lesser risk of heart attack compared to unvaccinated lot which means the vaccine in fact had a protective effect for cardiovascular health.

“This study conclusively point out that what we are using is safe and if one gets vaccinated it will give protection. Covid vaccination will be like influenza vaccine which would be given every year. With new variants, vaccines will be updated,” says Dr Mohit.

While the study rules out Covid vaccine’s role in triggering heart attack, the cases are on rise after pandemic.

“India is evolving into a world capital of heart attack because of many factors and traditional factors like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, smoking are always there. Patterns and prevalence of these diseases are changing due to genetics also. Indians are more prone to heart attack than earlier. Second, factors like psychosocial stress, like anger, they are now having third highest predictive value of heart attacks. Our own analysis of 1700 patients showed 95% of population is suffering from severe to moderate stress in some way or the other. We are still bind-folded and not accepting this risk factor. 25% of heart attack population is between 18 to 35 years of age. They study telomere length or genetic length. You would be surprised that without any risk factor, their body age was 25 to 30 years, but their genetic age was 60 to 90 years. This is happening because their telomere length was completely destroyed,” says Dr Mohit Gupta.

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New biomaterial may repair tissue damage from heart attack

Scientists have developed a new biomaterial that can be injected intravenously, reduces inflammation in tissue and that could be used to repair the damage to cardiac tissue resulting from a heart attack.

Scientists have developed a new biomaterial that can be injected intravenously, reduces inflammation in tissue and that could be used to repair the damage to cardiac tissue resulting from a heart attack. The researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego, US, also provided proof of concept in a rodent model that the biomaterial could be beneficial to patients with traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension, the study said. The biomaterial was tested and proven effective in treating tissue damage caused by heart attacks in both rodent and large animal models, according to the study.

“This biomaterial allows for treating damaged tissue from the inside out,” said Karen Christman, a professor at UC San Diego, and the lead researcher on the team that developed the material.

“It’s a new approach to regenerative engineering,” said Christman.

A study on the safety and efficacy of the biomaterial in human subjects could start within one to two years, Christman said.

The study is published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

After a heart attack, scar tissue develops, which diminishes muscle function and can lead to congestive heart failure. There is no established treatment for repairing the resulting damage to cardiac tissue that follows a heart attack.

“Coronary artery disease, acute myocardial infarction, and congestive heart failure continue to be the most burdensome public health problems affecting our society today,” said Dr. Ryan R. Reeves, a physician in the UC San Diego Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.

“As an interventional cardiologist, who treats patients with coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure on a daily basis, I would love to have another therapy to improve patient outcomes and reduce debilitating symptoms,” said Reeves.

The team wanted to develop a treatment that could be administered immediately after a heart attack. This meant developing a biomaterial that could be infused into a blood vessel in the heart at the same time as other treatments such as angioplasty or a stent, or injected intravenously, the study said.

“We sought to design a biomaterial therapy that could be delivered to difficult-to-access organs and tissues, and we came up with the method to take advantage of the bloodstream – the vessels that already supply blood to these organs and tissues,” said Martin Spang, the paper’s first author.

According to the study, one advantage of the new biomaterial is that it gets evenly distributed throughout damaged tissue, because it is infused or injected intravenously.

Researchers in Christman’s lab started with the hydrogel they developed, which was proven to be compatible with blood injections as part of safety trials. But the particle size in the hydrogel was too big to target leaky blood vessels, the study said.

Spang, then a PhD student in Christman’s lab, solved this issue by putting the liquid precursor of the hydrogel through a centrifuge, which allowed for sifting out bigger particles and keeping only nano-sized particles, the study said.

The resulting material was put through dialysis and sterile filtering before being freeze dried. Adding sterile water to the final powder results in a biomaterial that can be injected intravenously or infused into a coronary artery in the heart, the study said.

Researchers then tested the biomaterial on a rodent model of heart attacks. They expected the material to pass through the blood vessels and into the tissue because gaps develop between endothelial cells in blood vessels after a heart attack, the study said.

But something else happened.

The biomaterial bound to those cells, closing the gaps and accelerating healing of the blood vessels, reducing inflammation as a result. Researchers tested the biomaterial in a porcine model of heart attack as well, with similar results, the study said.

The team also successfully tested the hypothesis that the same biomaterial could help target other types of inflammation in rat models of traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Christman’s lab will undertake several preclinical studies for these conditions, the study said.