Pneumonia May Increase Heart Risk
Posted on: Wednesday, 20 June 2007, 09:01 CDT
Patients hospitalized with pneumonia may be at serious risk of new or worsening heart problems, found a U.S. study.
Dr. Daniel Musher studied the records of all 170 patients hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia at a Texas Veterans Affairs Medical Center from 2001 to 2005 and found that 19 percent of them had a heart attack or other major heart problem at the time of admission.
The presence of the heart condition significantly increased mortality from pneumonia, according to the study published in the July 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, currently available online.
When adult patients were hospitalized with a diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia, the concurrence of pneumonia and a new cardiac event was often unrecognized, especially in the first 12 to 24 hours of hospitalization, which led some patients to go without antibiotics for pneumonia and others to have no cardiac monitoring or anticoagulant therapy, according to Musher.
The authors suggest that pneumonia increases the risk of heart problems by increasing the heart's demand for oxygen while simultaneously causing a decrease in the lungs' ability to transfer oxygen from the air to the blood.
Source: United Press International
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