According to the chancellor of the hospital where Letlow was treated, Louis Letina, the Louisiana election, died last week from COVID-19 complications related to a blood clot and heart attack.
Letlow, 41, experienced the heart attack last week following a medical procedure at LSU Health Shreveport to remove a blood clot caused by the virus.
“Elected Congressman Luke Letlow eventually died of complications from COVID-19. His immediate death from a heart attack is likely related to thromboembolic events caused by COVID-19,” said Dr. GE Ghali, Chreveport’s chancellor, told Fox News in a statement.
Thromboembolism is the formation of a blood clot that can travel through veins to other parts of the body, possibly stopping vessels within the limbs, lungs and even the brain, which can cause heart attacks or strokes.
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“COVID-19 thickens blood, and it is a risk for heart attacks,” said Dr. Adrian Messerli, director of Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at the University of Kentucky Health Care, told Fox News. “The coagulation disorder associated with COVID is something we are very familiar with.”
Luke Letlow, Chief of Staff to US Representative Ralph Abraham, speaks after registering for the Fifth Congress District of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, La (AP Photo / Melinda Deslatte, File)
“If there is a compromise with the lungs and as a result there are problems with breathing, doctors can try to remove part of the blood clot from the lung,” Messerli said. This is one reason why Letlow underwent a procedure, although it is unknown. exactly what procedure doctors performed on the late-elected congressman. Shreveport did not share further details.
Dr. Tom Maddox, a practicing cardiologist and professor of cardiology at the Washington University School of Medicine, said that “in extreme cases, ‘doctors’ can do clot removal if it causes life-threatening obstruction of a particular organ, such as the lungs. or a limb.
LUKE LETLOW, 41-year-old congressman, dies with COVID-19
Both cardiologists, who are not directly familiar with Letlow’s death but are experts in the field and who have studied how COVID-19 can affect the heart, said that clotting can be fairly common in COVID-19 patients because the disease causes inflammation, which affects the blood.
COVID-19 “generates a lot of inflammatory proteins and substances in the blood,” Maddox said. The primary function of the blood is to activate white blood cells to fight an infection, so if inflammation occurs due to COVID-19, it can increase the … relative thickness of the blood, which can then lead to the formation of blood clots and other problems.
Many COVID-19 patients are being treated with preventative doses of blood thinners, which, according to Maddox, are still an ‘active research area’.
Blood clot (credit: iStock)
Because blood clots leading to heart attacks are rare for young people who apparently have no underlying medical conditions, the reason Letlow had a heart attack is a direct result of ‘COVID-19 infection’, Messerli said.
Maddox explained that the procedure for mechanically removing a blood clot from a COVID-19 patient is ‘much less than 1%’, and depending on the underlying health conditions of patients, Letlow’s personal risk of die as a result of a heart attack, even in a procedure “and” the setting of a major infection such as COVID would also be less than 1%. “
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“It sounds like he was just very unhappy in the course of his illness,” the professor said. He later added that ‘it is of course rare for someone like [Letlow] to die, but it happens, and that’s why we’re just as crazy about wearing masks, distancing ourselves – all the things we always hit the drums on. ‘
Messerli suspected that Letlow probably had a major heart attack and that doctors could not resuscitate him.
“There are, of course, smaller heart attacks, and then there are larger heart attacks, and that has to do with what part of the heart anatomy the heart attack takes place inside,” he said. “So if you have a very serious heart attack involving multiple arteries, the mortality rate for something like that is much higher than a less severe heart attack.”
GE Ghali, Chancellor of Shreveport, told the Monroe News-Star that Letlow has no underlying conditions.
“It’s devastating for our entire team,” Ghali told the outlet, adding that Letlow had no underlying conditions. “It was just BOUGHT.”
Maddox asked her if the stress of Letlow’s COVID-19 infection, in addition to “any medical procedure” he may have undergone “together”, had resulted in a heart attack. ‘
Both doctors express sympathy with Letlow’s family and the medical providers who treated his illness.
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“It’s a most horrible trauma for the families involved … but it’s also very traumatic for the providers, because it’s not people we’s used to dying,” Messerli said. “Caring for such a young man who is about to embark on a congressional career and has died as a result of this illness is emotionally traumatic.”
Maddox said there is still so much that experts do not know about the new virus that has taken more than 350,000 lives in the US alone.
“Why it sometimes rages like a wildfire among young people, we do not yet know,” he said. “There are speculations that some people may be prone. When they get an infection, their immune system goes really crazy and exceeds what is needed to fight the infection.”
“Why that would be, there is not yet a strong theory. We do not understand it so well, and maybe it’s someone’s genetic predisposition or other things,” he continued. “… There is no reliable way to know who will have the possible reaction to whom, so the best strategy right now is to say that everyone should take as much precaution as possible.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eight out of 10 COVID-19 deaths in the United States occur in adults 65 years of age or older.
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Adults between the ages of 40 and 49 are three times more likely to be hospitalized and ten times more likely to die from the virus than a comparison group of adults between 18 and 29 years.
One July study published in MedRxiv found that the infectious mortality rate (IFR) increased from 0.01% among 25-year-old adults to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65 , 4.6% at age 75 and 15% at age 85 However, certain underlying medical conditions can exacerbate COVID-19 cases.
It remains unclear why some young, healthy individuals experience severe symptoms and sometimes even death. Experts have suggested that the genetic makeup of a healthy person may play a role in how individual bodies respond to the virus.