The ACE2 expression in human heart indicates new potential mechanism of heart injury among patients infected with SARS-CoV-2
By Liang Chen, Xiangjie Li, Mingquan Chen, Yi Feng, C. Xiong. Cardiovascular Research, 2020
1,013 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract A new type of pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks recently in China and spreads into many other countries. This disease, named as COVID-19, is similar to patients infected by SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, and nearly 20% of patients developed severe condition. Cardiac injury is a prevalent complication of severe patients, exacerbating the disease severity in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the key host cellular receptor of SARS-CoV-2, has been identified in multiple organs, but its cellular distribution in human heart is not illuminated clearly. This study performed the first state-of-art single cell atlas of adult human heart, and revealed that pericytes with high expression of ACE2 might act as the target cardiac cell of SARS-CoV-2. The pericytes injury due to virus infection may result in capillary endothelial cells dysfunction, inducing microvascular dysfunction. And patients with basic heart failure disease showed increased ACE2 expression at both mRNA and protein levels, meaning that if infected by the virus these patients may have higher risk of heart attack and critically ill condition. The finding of this study explains the high rate of severe cases among COVID-19 patients with basic cardiovascular disease; and these results also perhaps provide important reference to clinical treatment of cardiac injury among severe patients infected by SARS-CoV-2.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9df919571f5589f826599cd018a786b3a08daab4
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Citations in the corpus
- Cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 (2020, positive): “Recent research, however, has suggested that the virus may also cause direct damage to the heart utilizing ACE2 receptors located within cardiac tissue [17] .”
- COVID-19 and the cardiovascular system: implications for risk assessment, diagnosis, and treatment options (2020, background): “Moreover, a recent single-cell atlas of the human heart indicated that pericytes express particularly high levels of ACE2 in the heart.(47) One of the implications of this finding is possible local microvascular inflammation during SARS-CoV-2 infection of the pericytes, leading to severe microvascul”
- Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (2020, neutral): “LVEF, mean (SD), % 57 (6) 60 (5)c 62 (8)c <.”
- The Role of Imaging in the Detection and Management of COVID-19: A Review (2020, background): “Thestudy carriedoutbyChen et al. [56] confirmed that patients with basic heart failure disease showed increased ACE2 expression at both mRNA and protein levels and may have a higher risk of heart attack and critically ill condition.”