This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Robert A. Harrington, MD: Hi. This is Bob Harrington from Stanford University, here on Medscape Cardiology and theheart.org. Today, we're going to extend a conversation that we've had several times over the past few years in talking about the cardiovascular complications of COVID-19.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, we, on this show, talked about some of the acute cardiovascular issues surrounding the infection, talked about how people with cardiovascular disease might be at increased risk for infection, talked about some of the cardiovascular complications, began to explore topics like endothelial dysfunction and thrombosis, and really, I think, set the stage for the next few years of thinking about and watching research take place that dealt with some of those acute manifestations.
As the pandemic progressed, we also became interested in talking about what was being observed in long COVID-19. In particular, this past year, we had a conversation with an investigatorwho had really looked carefully at the US VA database to begin to understand what might some of the epidemiologic observations be around an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease among a group of patients who had suffered acute COVID-19 infection and now looking out 6 months, 1 year, or more than 1 year later.
