Hospitalized Flu Patients Often Come Down With Acute Heart Problems

Cardiovascular events were common contributors to the morbidity and mortality of influenza among hospitalized patients, the CDC reported.

Adults hospitalized with the flu wound up suffering an acute cardiovascular event in 11.7% of cases — most commonly acute heart failure (6.2%) and/or acute ischemic heart disease (5.7%) — according to data from the U.S. Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network.

Those who had such events were in the hospital for a median of 5 days, and many wound up admitted to the intensive care unit (31.2%), requiring mechanical ventilatory support (14.0%) or dying in the hospital (7.3%), reported Shikha Garg, MD, of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in Atlanta, and colleagues. Their paper was published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Read More Here: by Nicole Lou, Staff Writer, MedPage Today August 24, 2020