Hallazgos clínicos post covid-19 en pacientes con insuficiencia cardíaca en el Instituto Ecuatoriano del Corazón de Guayaquil, Ecuador de 2022 a 2023.

Abstract

Heart failure (HF) is a disease of high prevalence worldwide with more than 10% in people over 70 years of age. COVID-19 infection can trigger a worsening of chronic non-communicable diseases such as HF, chronic kidney disease (CKD), type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2), among others. This study was based on evaluating the post-COVID clinical findings in patients with heart failure at the Ecuadorian Heart Institute (IECOR). This descriptive cross-sectional study evaluates the clinical findings of 31 patients with heart failure of IECOR from January 2022 to February 2023, period of COVID wave probable omicron strain, before and after being infected as: symptoms, signs, functional class according to the New york heart association (NYHA) scale, HF classification according to left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) based on 3D transthoracic echocardiogram (3D TTE), number of hospitalizations and electrocardiographic alterations. The results showed that fatigue was a significantly more frequent post-COVID symptom (p=0.004), hepatojugular reflux and headache were significantly more frequent pre-infection (p= 0.004 and p=0.039, respectively). Taking into account all patients with reduced LVEF (LVEF-r), preserved LVEF (LVEF-p) and slightly reduced LVEF (LVEF-lr) and their number of hospitalizations showed no significant changes before and after the pandemic. The functional class classification by NYHA grade I/II pre-COVID-19 which were 68% of the patients decreased to 61%, at the expense of which class III/IV increased post-COVID after the pandemic from 32.23% to 38.71%, despite this, these differences were not statistically significant (p=0.500). This evaluation of clinical findings concluded that fatigue is a more frequent clinical symptom post-COVID in these HF patients and that there was no worsening of heart failure after COVID-19 infection.