Mechanical Complications of Acute Myocardial Infarction During COVID-19 Pandemics

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemics has put an overwhelming pressure on the healthcare systems of many European countries. Such a situation has potentially led to delayed and impaired access to appropriate treatment for patients affected by other severe, non-COVID-19-related conditions, including cardiovascular diseases. This resulted in a reported lower admission, but higher mortality rate for AMI patients. Such a situation might be explained by many factors, including unavailability of early reperfusion therapy and late hospital presentation of AMI patients due to a general anxiety related to the COVID-19 contagious risk of the hospital environment. As a matter of fact, during this year of pandemics, several case reports suggested a new, significant surge of post-AMI mechanical complications, sometimes describing patients admitted in too severe conditions to consider surgical repair a viable option, and therefore inevitably undergone an unfavorable outcome. Therefore, we decided to involve the large network of European centers already participating to the "Caution Study 1", in order to study the impact of COVID-19 pandemics on the outcomes, incidence and treatments of post-AMI mechanical complications.