Sep 19, 2022
This week, please join author Jonathan Sterne and Associate Editor Shinya Goto as they discuss the article "Association of COVID-19 With Major Arterial and Venous Thrombotic Diseases: A Population-Wide Cohort Study of 48 Million Adults in England and Wales."
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the Journal and its editors. We're your co-hosts. I'm Dr. Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore.
Dr. Greg Hundley:
And I'm Dr. Greg Hundley, associate editor, director of the Pauley Heart Center at VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
Oh, Greg, we've got a special treat for everyone today. We have a third co-host and he is none other than Peder Myhre from Norway! Really adding to the diversity of our podcast: me from Asia, you from the US, and Peder from Europe. Welcome, Peder.
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Thank you so much, Carolyn. It's truly an honor to be here and I'm looking forward to being part of this podcast today.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
Awesome. Well, here we go. Looks like we have a feature paper, Greg?
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Absolutely, Carolyn. Peder, welcome. So, listeners, our feature today will involve COVID-19 and its association with arterial and venous thrombotic diseases. But before we get to that, we're going to all grab a cup of coffee from all over the world and get into some of the other articles in the issue. Peder, Carolyn, how about I go first?
My first study involves a prospective cohort of 94,000 individuals from the UK Biobank, who had device-measured physical activity from 2013 to 2015 and were free from myocardial infarction and heart failure. Now, Peder and Carolyn, the study was performed because although objectively measured physical activity has been found associated with acute cardiovascular outcomes, it has not been found associated with heart failure and, of course, a syndrome that's been expanding worldwide. As such this study led by Carlos Celis-Morales from the University of Glasgow aimed to investigate the dose response relationship between device-measured physical activity and heart failure by intensity of the physical activity. Now physical activity was measured with a wrist-worn accelerometer and time spent on light, moderate, and vigorous intensity physical activity was extracted. Incidental heart failure was ascertained from linked hospital and death records.
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Wow, Greg. That sounds amazing. Tell us, what did they find?
Dr. Greg Hundley:
You bet, Peder! These investigators found that, compared with participants who undertook no moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, those who performed 150 to 300 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes per week of vigorous intensity physical activity were at lower risk of heart failure. Now, interestingly, the association between vigorous intensity physical activity and heart failure was a reverse J-shaped curve with a potentially lower risk reduction above 150 minutes per week.
And so, the take-home message for this first paper is that device-measured physical activity, especially moderate intensity physical activity, was associated with a lower risk of heart failure. Probably current vigorous intensity physical activity recommendations should be encouraged, but not necessarily increased. In contrast, increasing moderate intensity physical activity may be beneficial, even among those meeting current recommendations.
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Wow, Greg. That was a great summary. And the second original research article today is about high density lipoproteins. As you know, raising HDL cholesterol levels to prevent cardiovascular disease remains a hot topic. HDL plays a key role in reverse cholesterol transport and may be cardioprotective and reduce infarct size in the setting of myocardial injury. Lecithin cholesterol acyl transferase, LCAT, is the rate limiting enzyme in the reverse cholesterol transport and a recombinant human LCAT called MEDI6012 has previously been shown to increase HDL cholesterol. So in this study from the corresponding author, Marc Bonaca from University of Colorado School of Medicine, the investigators in the real team is 63B multicenter placebo control trial investigated whether randomized patients to, MEDI6012 or placebo would reduce the infarct size as measured by cardiac MRI, 10 to 12 weeks after the STEMI.
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Very interesting, Peder. So, MRI assessments of LV mass after PCI. So, what did they find?
Dr. Peder Myhre:
So, Greg, the authors successfully enrolled 593 patients with a median age of 62 years and 78% males. And the median time from symptom onset to randomization was 146 minutes and only 13 minutes from hospitalization to randomization. And the index MI was anterior in 70% and 65% had TIMI Flow grade 0-1. And then to the main results at 12 weeks, the infarct size did not defer between the treatment group. So that was a 9.7% infarct size for MEDI6012 versus 10.5% for placebo with a P value of 0.79. And there was also no difference in noncalcified black volume. So the authors conclude that enhanced reverse cholesterol transport with recombinant human LCAT did not reduce infarct size or late regression of noncalcified coronary REPL at 12 weeks. Okay, Greg. So tell me about the 3rd paper you have today?
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Peder, what a great description on that previous paper, beautiful job there. So Peder, this next article pertains to cardio toxicity related to the administration of anthracycline-based chemotherapy. And an example would be Doxorubicin. And this occurs in patients often with certain types of cancer. As you know, Doxorubicin is still utilized for the treatment of leukemia, lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma and in the setting of adjuvant breast cancer treatment. And so to this end, the authors, led by Lorrie Kirshenbaum from St. Boniface Hospital abstract research, wanted to assess cytokine mediated inflammation in myocellular injury, as a result of some of the inflammation that's induced by the administration of Doxorubicin. So as a little bit of background, cytokines, such as TNF alpha, have been implicated in cardiac dysfunction and toxicity associated with Doxorubicin. Now, while TNF alpha can elicit different cellular responses, including survival or death, the mechanisms underlying these divergent outcomes in the heart really somewhat remain cryptic.
The E3 ubiquitin ligase, TRAF2, provides a critical signaling platform for K63 length poly ubiquitin nation of rip K1, crucial for NF-kB activation by TNF alpha and survival. Whether alterations in TNF alpha, TRAF2, NF-kB activation signaling underlie the cardiotoxic effects of Doxorubicin, remains poorly understood. So herein, these authors investigated TRAF2 signaling in the pathogenesis of Doxorubicin cardio toxicity.
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Oh wow, Greg. So we're talking mitochondrial dysfunction in Doxorubicin cardiomyopathy. So please tell me, what did they find and what were the clinical implications?
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Very nice. Peder, you remind me of Carolyn, asking me the clinical implications. Okay, so first, in mouse models and in vitro measures in rats, mouse and human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes, these investigators monitored TNF alpha levels, LDH, cardiac ultra structure and function, mitochondrial biogenics, as you just suggested, and cardiac cell viability. They found that a novel signaling axis exists that functionally connects the cardiotoxic effects of Doxorubicin to proteasomal degradation of TRAF2. Disruption of the critical TRAF2 survival pathway by Doxorubicin, sensitizes cardiomyocytes to TNF alpha and BNIP3 mediated necrotic cell death. Perhaps, interventions that stabilize TRAF2, so here's the clinical implication, may prove beneficial in mitigating the cardiotoxic effects in cancer patients undergoing anthracycline-based chemotherapy.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
So Greg, he may sound like me, but this is me going what an amazing summary and especially in something that is your specialty cardio-oncology, that's amazing. Thank you. Peder, I assume you've got one more paper?
Dr. Peder Myhre:
So Greg, now I'm going to sound like you and say that we are going to stay within the world of preclinical science. So genome-wide association studies have identified many genetic loci that are robustly associated with coronary artery disease. However, the underlying biological mechanisms are still unknown for most of these loci, hindering the progress to medical translation. And there is evidence to suggest that the genetic influence of coronary artery disease sociability may partly act through vascular smooth muscle cells. So corresponding author, Shu Ye from University of Leicester, performed genotyping, RNA sequencing and cell behavior assays on the large bank of vascular smooth muscle cells with an N of almost 1500. And through these extensive analysis, they saw to identify genes whose expression was influenced by coronary artery disease associated variants.
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Very nice, Peder. So, more about cardiac gene expression. So, what did they find?
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Approximately 60% of the known coronary artery disease associated variants show statistically significant effects in vascular smooth muscle cells and the study identified 84 candidate causal genes whose expression quantitative trait, loci signals in vascular smooth muscle cells, significantly co-localized with reported coronary artery disease association signals, of which 38 of them are potentially druggable, so, that was the clinical implications. The authors conclude that a large percentage of coronary artery disease loci can modulate genes, gene expression in vascular smooth muscle cells and influence these cell behavior. Several candidate causal genes identified are likely to be druggable and thus represent potential therapeutic targets. And Greg, accompanying this paper is a beautiful editorial by doctors O'Donnell and Bradner entitled "Bridging the Gap to Translating Genome-Wide Discoveries into Therapies to Prevent and Treat Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease."
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Very nicely done Peder, very nicely done. Well, as usual, we have some other items, we call it in the mail bag because we receive these wonderful research letters and also research correspondence. So I'll go first. First, Dr. Al-Khatib has a research letter entitled, "Duration of Anticoagulation Interruption before Invasive Procedures and Outcomes in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation Insights from the Aristotle Trial." And also there's a nice ECG analysis by Dr. Tsai entitled, "A Peculiar Wide-Complex Tachycardia During Flecainide Treatment."
Dr. Peder Myhre:
Nice, Greg, and there's also an exchange on letters to the editors and the response from Professors Zhao and Ding, and again, a response from Professor Zhang regarding the prior letter by Jin et al. pertaining to the previously published article "Micro RNA, 210 Controls, Mitochondrial Metabolism and Protects Heart Function in Myocardial Infarction."
Dr. Greg Hundley:
Beautifully done, Peder. Oh, wow. Welcome to this team. We're so excited to have you. And now Carolyn, I think we're going to jump over to that feature discussion and learn a little bit more about COVID-19 and arterial and venous thrombotic disease.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
You bet! Let's go, Greg and Peder.
Now we all know that infection with COVID 19 induces a pro-thrombotic state, but the long term effects of COVID-19 on the incidence of vascular disease, both arterial and venous, remain unclear. That is until today's feature paper. We're so grateful to have corresponding author Dr. Jonathan Stern, from the University of Bristol, as well as our associate editor, Dr. Shinya Goto from Tokai University School of Medicine to join us and discuss this very important paper today. Jonathan, could you start us off on telling us why it's so important to look at this? Haven't we always known that infections, COVID or not, are associated with pro-thrombotic state? So what's so different about what you did and what you found this time?
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
So, yes, I think we already knew that serious infections, in particular infections leading to hospitalization, can result in thrombotic events, either arterial or venous. And it was also clear from January, February, March 2020, that COVID led to very serious infection and therefore was likely to lead to vascular events. The questions that we set out to address, beyond simply establishing that COVID does indeed do this, was to quantify by how much COVID multiplies the rate at which these thrombotic events occurred, to do that separately for different events, such as myocardial infarction, stroke, venous thromboembolism, pulmonary embolism. And then to importantly, because we analyzed a very large dataset, which we might want to talk about, to try to separate out the amount by which the rating events was multiplied over time and in important subgroups, for example, in hospital people who were hospitalized for their COVID, compared with people who weren't hospitalized for their COVID, by age and sex, and by other demographic characteristics.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
I love that, you see, that really set out the novel information this added with, may I add, very important clinical implications, which we'll get to them. You've already teed me up to talk about this 48 million adults that you managed to look at. Oh my goodness! Tell us, how in the world did you do that?
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
Well, I think the first thing to say is that it's my absolute privilege to talk about this paper on behalf of a really incredible team that put the work together. And a lot of that work, or that work started with really unlocking the power of NHS data because of the COVID pandemic. So in the UK, we have a national health service, free at the point of delivery to everybody. The NHS assembled electronic health records, and there's been a long and proud history of research based on electronic health records in the UK. But for the first time, because of the pandemic, a combined data resource for the whole of England, so that's a population of about 58 million people, was established and that linked primary care data - data from family doctors, data on secondary care hospital admissions, data on COVID testing and subsequently, although it's not the subject of this paper, data on vaccination.
So those data were all linked and put into one place within what's called a trusted research environment with very strict controls on what can be output from the environment in order to protect patient privacy. And that was really done during 2020. And then the analyses for this paper took place during 2021, and it was an enormous amount of work by a large and absolutely fantastic team of people across multiple UK universities and national health service institutions.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
Wow. Bravo! We talk about big data, we talk about using it. I trained in the NHS system. Who knew that this could come out to reveal such important results? So thank you for that as a background, but now, tell us what you found please?
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
So we found that rates of these conditions, they were primarily acute lymph infarction and ischemic stroke, which we grouped together with other conditions as arterial thrombotic events, and then deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, which we grouped together with other conditions as venous events. And we found that rates were substantially multiplied immediately after a diagnosis of COVID by up to 748 times, that the amount by which rates were multiplied diminished with time since COVID, but importantly that even six months to a year after that first diagnosis of COVID, rates of venous events were still about double in people who'd had COVID, compared to people who had COVID. And we found, it seemed quite clear that the persistence of the elevated risk was longer for venous events than for arterial events.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
Just really fascinating results and Shinya, could I ask, what are your thoughts on this? And as you were managing this paper, the implications?
Dr. Shinya Goto:
First of all, thank you very much, Jonathan, for choosing saturation for your great paper. I'm handling quite a lot of papers, but your paper was very attractive. As Carolyn mentioned, it's huge data! 48 million, it's surprising, and also you also pick up booster rate of arterial embolism event for years, and you have also shown adjusted rate is initially increased quite a lot and then decreased gradually. And even after two months, three months still, there is a persisted higher risk. And as you mentioned, for the venous thrombo embolism, it's persisted for more than year to year. It's surprising. COVID-19's a different disease. Perhaps COVID-19 infection cuts to the vascular endarterial cell, perhaps, your research raised a lot of research questions, like endarterial damage induced by COVID-19 in the past 6 months; I would say more than half a year to one year. So that mechanistical insight is very important. And you raise a lot of any clinical questions.
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
Well, thank you very much for your kind words and you are right, I think we are left with questions about maybe in three areas. Firstly, for how long is there an elevation in risk? I should probably say, for those who haven't read the paper, that these results relate to events that occurred in England and Wales during 2020. And so that is in an era before vaccination and when we were dealing with the original variant, and to some extent, the alpha variant. So we are still waiting to see what the implications were over longer periods, and we will be doing that, we will be extending follow up. In fact, we are at the moment extending those results. I think, secondly, we are left with questions about the mechanisms, which you articulated, and thirdly, there's the question about, well, what are the implications for clinical management of patients with COVID-19? And in particular, for patients who've had severe COVID-19, for example, severe enough to be hospitalized for it?
Dr. Shinya Goto:
Yeah, you have also showed a very important point that even known hospitalization for COVID-19, the risk of thrombosis becomes high. So it's very surprising. And even non-hospitalized patients have a higher risk of thrombosis. That is probably the huge difference between other virus infections and COVID-19.
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
Yes. The good news, if you weren't hospitalized for your COVID, is that the elevation in risk declines more rapidly for people with less severe COVID who weren't hospitalized than for people with more severe COVID who were hospitalized. But nonetheless, as you say, particularly in the first week, two weeks, three weeks after COVID, there is a clear elevation in the risk of both arterial and venous events, even if you were not hospitalized for your COVID. We should probably also bear in mind that these results for 2020, when there were severe constraints for some of the time on health service resources. So you probably had to be pretty sick to get hospitalized at that time.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
That was a very important caveat that you just highlighted. So thank you for contextualizing those findings for us, Jonathan, but then I kind of wish all podcast guests were like you, and you already asked a question, I was going to ask you. Which is, okay, so what's the clinical implication? Should we all be taking some low dose NOAC or aspirin? Whether you're hospitalized or not? Or if you were in 2020? Because, jokes aside, I know that you found some very important risk factors? Or these events which had clinical implications? Could you expand on it?
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
So maybe I'd start by saying that we didn't find that these patterns varied dramatically either by sex or by age. And in fact, when we were planning the analyses, I was convinced that we would see dramatic differences in these hazard ratios by age. And, broadly speaking, the facts on a multiplicative scale, the amount by which your rate is multiplied, looked similar across age groups and by sex. On the other hand, we did see the amount by rates of arterial and venous events were multiplied, appeared greater in people of Asian ethnicity or Black ethnicity than in people of White ethnicity. A counterintuitive finding was that the amount by which your rate was multiplied is lower, if you've had a prior event than if you hadn't. Those are the sorts of extents to which we can say something about how your own characteristics predict the consequences once you've had COVID.
In terms of management, obviously the pandemic has been tumultuous for medicine and for medical research and things have moved on greatly since the pre-vaccination era, 2020 and early 2021, to which these analyses relate. So the first thing to say is, don't get hospitalized with COVID, and the best way to not be hospitalized with COVID, is to be fully vaccinated for COVID. And that's a message that I think the whole of the medical profession has communicated loudly and clearly for a long time now.
So the second thing is, well, okay, what about if, nonetheless, you got COVID, particularly severe COVID, and we discussed this in the team extensively, and I particularly want to mention the senior clinical author, Dr. Will Whiteley from the University of Edinburgh in this regard, and I think the main message here is that risk factor management, cardiovascular risk factor management is always important, but it's probably particularly important in people who've had severe COVID to review risk factor management and make sure that existing guidelines in terms of cholesterol lowering, blood pressure lowering and so on, are being adhered to. We don't... So the most important thing is adherence to existing cardiovascular risk management guidelines. I think we don't have evidence that specific additional interventions are indicated in people who've had COVID, and COVID now in the era of Omicron and widespread vaccination is not the same as COVID during 2020.
Dr. Shinya Goto:
Jonathan, you have raised a very important issue. I strongly recommend all audiences to read this paper. We have to know persistent or higher risk of myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, may be controlled more regularly controlled. Don't fear the COVID-19 infection to visiting the healthcare professional. In my country, some of the population stopped coming to the healthcare professional because they fear so much about infection from the hospital or clinic. But it's very important to keep that regular control like static and blood pressure control. Maybe we don't have that data about aspiring or not, but strong message your paper gave is that risk factor control after COVID-19 is very important.
Dr. Jonathan Stern:
I completely agree.
Dr. Carolyn Lam:
And I would add to that, remember the days when people were stopping their ACE inhibitors and so on for those fear? So what a great message and thank you for giving us a little bit of a peek into the future of what you're planning next with more follow up, in a population that is vaccinated from a different strain perhaps. And I think this still encourages hopefully more trials and research into this whole area of how we should be managing these patients. Well, thank you so much both of you for discussing this very, very current relevant, important paper. Thank you for publishing it in circulation with us. And to the audience, thank you for joining us today. From Greg and I, you've been listening to Circulation on the Run, and don't forget to tune in again next week.
Speaker 6:
This program is copyright of the American Heart Association, 2022. The opinions expressed by speakers in this podcast are their own and not necessarily those of the editors or of the American Heart Association. For more, please visit ahajournals.org.