This year we have continued with our COVID-19 and CVD research efforts, with the commencement of the WHF COVID-19 & CVD Extension study and Long COVID Study. As previously communicated, the World Health Organization (WHO) has commissioned the WHF COVID-19 & CVD study team to continue recruitment of up to 3300 patients. The extension of patient recruitment will further provide valuable insights on the temporal trends in clinical characteristics of COVID-19 and the impact of COVID-19 vaccination on the clinical outcomes at discharge and overall mortality. It will improve our understanding of the specific causes of death such as sudden cardiac death and its relationship with COVID-19 infection. This study will uniquely collect information on the anti-microbial resistance data and analyse its association with outcomes in COVID-19 patients, which will be particularly useful for policymakers and health authorities across the world.

 

We now have sites from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mexico, South Africa, Portugal, Colombia, Russia, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Iran, Brazil and Indonesia participating.

 

We wish to thank all the National Coordinators and Site investigators from Japan, South Africa, India, Mexico and Colombia for their patient recruitment and data entry efforts in the WHF COVID-19 & CVD Extension study.

We are pleased to report that the final results "Cardiovascular Risk Factors and Clinical Outcomes among Patients Hospitalized with COVID-19: Findings from the World Heart Federation COVID-19 Study" have now been published in the Global Heart Journal. You can review the paper here.

We have also launched the WHF Long Covid sub-study to determine the short- (3 month), medium- (6 month) and long-term (12 month) sequelae to COVID-19 including re-hospitalization and mortality, symptoms, impact on physical function, psycho-social consequences. Patient recruitment will come from the Extension Study. Payment of USD 75 per patient is to be made to Sites. Please register your interest by contacting the WHF Office.

Some sites have received ethics approval for the Extension study however are experiencing low admission rates. Therefore the study steering committee agreed to allow retrospective data collection for 25 patients only. The Patient recruitment strategy can be viewed here.