I saw a post today discussing palpitations after COVID. Folks, what I tell my patients is: if you get palpitations in the weeks to months after COVID, call your doc and get seen. Here’s why — palpitations after COVID are common, and one prevalent cause is atrial fibrillation. This is often detected by a wearable event recorder such as a Holter monitor, because a 1-time ECG (as if often done in the ER) is worthless if you aren’t in a-fib at the time. A-fib dramatically increases stroke risk.
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Common? Patients who have had COVID have only a 20% increased risk of AFib post infection. Thats hardly "common" that would make it fairly rare.
@freemo I said palpitations are common (10-20% of folks with post-COVID syndromes have them). A-fib is one of the many causes of this, and I would argue is not all that rare compared to many things we consider quite serious in Emergency Medicine, particularly since a-fib has a significant stroke risk associated with it. We can quibble over what exact cutoff makes something a concern I suppose, but to what end?
> but to what end?
Largely my concern is fear mongering (perhaps unintentional). There has been a great deal of over-hyping COVID and has caused people to be dispreportionaltly scared of the disease and its consequences. While it is of course a serious disease people have heard so much disinformation to make it sound scarier than it is that people are often irrationally afraid of it relative to the risks.
Saying its common makes people think most people who catch it will start having heart problems when in fact a very very small portion of people who catch it will. So that needs pointing out.
@freemo up to 30% of people who get COVID get some form of post-COVID syndrome. Estimates vary widely on the number who experience cardiovascular complications, but there are entire clinics dedicated the problem, so it isn’t exactly a rare presentation to healthcare. I agree that there is overhyping of some of the risk, but overall, I would argue that in fact the risks associated with infection have been downplayed quite a bit.
See this is what I'm talking about. An actual review of the literature would show the prevelance of post-covid syndroms is not yet known, the studies we do have range from <10% to 30%/35% at the absolute highest end. Yet you are 1) quoting it as if its well established, it is not 2) picking from the highest end of the spectrum (fear mongering).
Couple this with the fact that there is a great deal of fear, and an impossiblity to test for this in a double-blind fashion you get a recipe for disaster one would expect highly inflated numbers due to the placebo effect alone.
As a COVID Research scientist myself, and you as a doctor, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards when we state things as fact. You cant just cherry pick a study that gives the number you want, we have to be mindful of the consensus and the body of literature and leave our personal biases out of it.
Sorry my tone may be a bit on the harsher side than you deserve. But you get my point.
