Using a Systems Approach to Explore the Mechanisms of Interaction Between Severe Covid-19 and Its Coronary Heart Disease Complications

• Published in: Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine Vol. 9; p. 737592
• Main Authors: Meyer, Albertus A, Mathews, Edward H, Gous, Andries G S, Mathews, Marc J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 16.02.2022
• Subjects: cardiovascular comorbidities; Cardiovascular Medicine; coronary heart disease; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; systems-approaches; COVID-19; systems-approaches; SARS-CoV-2; coronary heart disease; cardiovascular comorbidities
• ISSN: 2297-055X; 2297-055X
• DOI: 10.3389/fcvm.2022.737592

requested research on how a systems approach can explore the mechanisms of cardiovascular complications in Covid-19. The focus of this paper will thus be on these detailed mechanisms. It will elucidate the integrated pathogenic pathways based on an extensive review of literature. Many severe Covid-19 cases and deaths occur in patients with chronic cardiovascular comorbidities. To help understand all the mechanisms of this interaction, Covid-19 complications were integrated into a pre-existing systems-based coronary heart disease (CHD) model. Such a complete model could not be found in literature. A fully integrative view could be valuable in identifying new , help understand how influence Covid-19 severity and give a fully integrated explanation for the Covid-19 phenomenon seen in some patients. Covid-19 data showed that CHD hallmarks namely, and have an important effect on disease severity. The pathogenic pathways that Covid-19 activate in CHD were integrated into the CHD model. This fully integrated model presents a visual explanation of the mechanism of interaction between CHD and Covid-19 complications. This includes a detailed integrated explanation of the death spiral as a result of interactions between , endothelial cell injury, and hypoxia. Additionally, the model presents the aggravation of this through the other CHD hallmarks namely, , and/or . The resulting model further suggests systematically how the pathogenesis of nine (stress, exercise, smoking, etc.) and seven (statins, salicylates, thrombin inhibitors, etc.) may either aggravate or suppress Covid-19 severity. A strong association between CHD and Covid-19 for all the investigated and , except for β-blockers, was found. It is further discussed how the proposed model can be extended in future to do computational analysis to help assess the risk of Covid-19 in cardiovascular disease. With insight gained from this study, recommendations are made for future research in potential new pharmacotherapeutics. These recommendations could also be beneficial for cardiovascular disease, which killed five times more people in the past year than Covid-19.