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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

COVID induced myocarditis has been thoroughly disproven:

https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/14/setting-the-record-strai...

Thanks for the article, an interesting read for sure. It’s nice to see there’s been plenty of follow-up study on this.

Respectfully, you’re wrong to say “thoroughly disproven”. Even the article ends with the suggestion that it’s a side-effect of covid, albeit a rare one.

The article’s position is more that it was overblown to worry about stopping young athletes from competing for fear of myo being a common side-effect as opposed to the ~1% rate the studies have since shown.

My wife died from myocarditis 2 months ago. The only thing she tested positive for was COVID.

The coroner's report however, was quite clear that COVID did not cause her death or the myocarditis and that there has been no such reported case anywhere in the world.

If anyone has information to dispute that I would be very interested to see it. Thanks

Myocarditis is unfortunately very common. There are many causes, including a panoply of viruses for which tests may not exist. That is probably why the coroner's report said what it did.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I’m so sorry for your loss, myo is a terrible illness and so poorly understood by the medical community - even cardiologists seem to have a hard time recognising it.

There’s a good deal of info available in medical journals relating to covid and myo. I’m no doctor though I’ve researched it well since being diagnosed.

I am sorry for your loss. May her memory be a blessing.

I wonder how many other coroners ruled a case of myocarditis to not have been caused by a recent COVID infection because other coroners had not been willing to make the association either?

Based on my personal experience, I'm pretty skeptical of this. I'm 28, healthy (or was previously), and have never previously had any issues with my heart. Got covid last April which came with quite sharp heart pain which seemed to match up very well to descriptions of myocarditis on and off for about 6 months. And I'm only just now getting to the point now where a raised heart beat isn't painful.

You might say it's anecdotal, but something had to cause that.

If you’re in a position to do so, I’d strongly recommend you get checked out if you’re having any kind of chest pain as your heart rate rises.

I lost count of how many times I was told “you’re too young to have any heart issues” before eventually being diagnosed with myo. FWIW I’m younger than you and though mild, my symptoms seem to have taken 9 months to mostly resolve.

I'm also young and have had mild to moderate chest pain (stabbing) that comes in bursts and can last hours. This was after what I thought was a cardiac event in February of 2019, a year before the pandemic, when I suddenly started feeling lightheaded and seeing stars, but the EMS said nothing was wrong. Before that moment I never had any chest pain, and it still comes back to this day occasionally. I must have had an ECG a dozen times since then. I ordered a barrage of tests up to a heart ultrasound and a stress test, and nothing came of it all. I was frequently told it was unlikely anything was wrong because of my age.

It was a miserable period of my life, not knowing if I was going to survive to the next day. The pain is always on the left side of my chest and has fluctuated around various regions of it. Recently it became worse again after taking Adderall, which raised my heart rate, so I still suspect something is wrong with my heart, but it seems that after a year of stressful hospital visits and no definitive answers, I've exhausted everything that would have given me a diagnosis at this point.

Sorry to hear about all that. I know it can be incredibly anxiety-inducing having any heart related issues, particularly at a young age when it's the last thing on your mind.

Frustratingly, it sounds like you've done everything you can. The ECG is extremely sensitive to any change in heart function so that's positive if it's showing normal results (was the only indicator for me - other than an MRI). Obviously you're still experiencing some symptoms, but between the ultrasound and stress test, they'd have seen if there were any structural abnormalities or any issues with function, valves, blockages, etc - so perhaps that's some reassurance.

Not to belittle from your experience in the slightest, but I wonder if you've considered other causes? Easy to think the worst but a surprising number of people end up in the ER suspecting heart attacks with only bad cases of heartburn (acid-reflux). Panic attacks are another common one. I only mention these as I think the anxiety and panic I experienced due to the stress was probably worse than the actual condition.

It's not belittling; I was considering much the same. My conclusion is that I definitely had anxiety during all those episodes, and the anxiety made the symptoms worse to some extent. My first panic attacks I ever experienced were caused by the symptoms early on when I had no evidence this was going to become chronic and relatively benign. I would be relieved if I could explain away my symptoms as mere hypochondria or acid reflux.

But I persisted for a while in the face of that because I felt that my body was trying to tell me something. Pain is a mechanism we've evolved with to indicate various abnormalities. I was willing to bet there was a reason behind the pain, instead of it serving no purpose whatsoever, and especially because this concerned the region where my heart was located, I felt it was urgent, since my heart is one thing that has to function for me to stay alive.

My unresolved anxiety is that I still haven't found the reason, so there has never been any closure for me. Worse, I might not be getting the treatment I need to prolong my lifespan. It's terrifying when considering that possibility in full, so I've had no choice but to put it out of my mind.

I stopped taking a lot of things about how I'm still alive for granted, but I've actually had start taking many of them for granted again, because if I didn't I would become completely paralyzed by fear for entire days. I had to find the balance between worrying about every potential cause of death I could face within the next hour causing desperation and expending my time being unproductive.

I did at least have a few positive outcomes since then. If it weren't for the constant pain and fear I don't think I would have changed my diet and started exercising as much as I did. The exercise was reassuring in a sense because the pain wasn't correlated with how strenuous it was. But now I try to be more wary about what I put in my body. I just hope it ends up mattering in the end. I wish I didn't have to worry about dying suddenly so often.

It might be worth going to a gastroenterologist to check on acid reflux. I was in a similar boat a couple years ago. Sharp chest pains out of nowhere. Heart stuff was ruled out by a cardiologist. I then had an endoscopy which confirmed something was out of whack with the sphincter between my esophagus and stomach, causing strong heartburn. After taking some heavy acid reducers for a few months, it managed to heal up and has been fine ever since. I can relate to the anxiety though. It was pretty intense at times and I had trouble sleeping or focusing on anything else. Hang in there.

Never previously had any issues with your heart... that you were aware of.

Heart issues can go unnoticed until the day you drop dead.

10 years ago I had diagnosed pericarditis from a viral infection. I had Covid in 2020 which caused a similar chest pain during elevated heart rate, it slowly resolved over a few months.

COVID is still an unfolding disaster. I doubt that anybody really understands completely what it does.

I have also been experiencing irregular heart beat and palpitations. Quite possible that I had COVID at some point.

Have you been exercising less since lockdowns started?

I never really exercised much. But heart palpitations are something new, been noticing it for the last few months.

I can share a story about heart palpitations: I started having them in ~2008 without any previous infection (that I know of). Interestingly enough, they were appearing when my heart rate was going down - most noticeably while I was lying in bed trying to sleep, which isn't easy if your heart starts "missing some beats" out of the blue! Went to various doctors, they couldn't find anything wrong with my heart, but couldn't find anything that could help me get rid of the palpitations either. Then, in 2010, I got chickenpox, which at age 36 is a pretty big deal, with high fever, blisters all over the body etc. That took two weeks, and after that my palpitations were gone, and haven't returned since (knock on wood, fingers crossed etc.). So I can only assume that I had some form of myocarditis and the high fever got rid of that too?! No idea...

Anecdotal or not, there have been plenty of otherwise healthy young people reporting everything from palpitations, chest pain to arrhythmia

https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidVaccinated/search?q=myocarditi... [1]

[1] /r/CovidVaccinated

https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidVaccinated/

While concerning, it's difficult to look at anecdata and be able to come to a conclusion. Like in my office, when someone declared that someone stole their phone. Suddenly every misplaced item going forward was reported stolen. So not sure if people are actually having a problem or if they are just 'normal' events that are now attributed to the vaccine.

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