Louisiana’s elected Republican deputy, Luke Letlow, died last week of COVID-19 complications related to a blood clot and heart attack, according to the chancellor of the hospital where Letlow had been treated.
Letlow, 41, suffered a heart attack last week after a medical procedure at LSU Health Shreveport to remove a blood clot caused by the virus.
“Congressman-elect Luke Letlow ended up dying of complications from COVID-19. His immediate death from a heart attack is probably related to thromboembolic phenomena caused by COVID-19,” Dr GE Ghali, Chancellor of Shreveport, said. Fox News in a statement.
Thromboembolism is the formation of a blood clot that can travel through veins to other parts of the body, potentially blocking vessels in the limbs, lungs and even the brain, which can cause heart attacks or strokes.
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“COVID-19 thickens the blood and that is a risk of heart attacks,” Dr. Adrian Messerli, director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at the University of Kentucky Health Care, told Fox News. “COVID-related clotting disorder is something we are very familiar with.”
Luke Letlow, deputy chief of US deputy Ralph Abraham, speaks after signing up to run for Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (AP Photo / Melinda Deslatte, Archive)
If lungs are compromised and patients have trouble breathing as a result, doctors may try to “extract some of the blood clot from the lung,” said Messerli, which may be the reason Letlow underwent a procedure, though it is unknown exactly what procedure the doctors performed on the late elected deputy. Shreveport did not share any further details.
Dr. Tom Maddox, a cardiologist and professor of cardiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said that “in extreme cases”, doctors can “remove the clot if it is creating a life-threatening blockage from a specific organ “like the lungs or a limb.
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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 coagulation can be quite common in patients with COVID-19 because the disease causes inflammation, which thickens the blood.
COVID-19 “generates a lot of proteins and inflammatory substances in the blood,” said Maddox. The main function of blood is to activate white blood cells to fight infection, so when inflammation occurs as a result of COVID-19, “it can increase … relative blood thickness”, which can then result in formation blood clots and other problems.
Many patients with COVID-19 are treated with prophylactic doses of anticoagulants, which Maddox said was still “an active area of investigation”.
Blood clot (Credit: iStock)
Because blood clots that lead to heart attacks are rare in young people who appear to have no underlying medical conditions, the reason that Letlow suffered a heart attack is a direct result of the “COVID-19 infection,” said Messerli.
Maddox explained that the mechanical removal procedure for a blood clot from a COVID-19 patient is “much less than 1%” and, depending on the patients’ underlying health conditions, Letlow’s personal risk of dying as a result of suffering an attack cardiac “even in a procedure” and in the “scenario of a major infection like COVID would also be less than 1%.”
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“It seems that he was very unlucky to go through all of this in the course of his illness,” said the professor. He later added that “it is rare, obviously, for someone like [Letlow] die, but it happens, which is why we are so manic for wearing masks, to distance ourselves – all the things we always touch. “
Messerli suspected that Letlow probably suffered a major heart attack and doctors were unable to resuscitate him.
“Obviously, there are minor heart attacks and then major heart attacks, and that has to do with the inner part of the heart artery anatomy in which the heart attack occurs,” he said. “So, if you have a very serious heart attack that is responsible for multiple arteries … the death rate for something like that is much higher than a minor heart attack.”
Chancellor of Shreveport, GE Ghali, told Monroe News-Star that Letlow had no underlying conditions.
“It is devastating for our entire team,” Ghali told the channel, adding that Letlow had no underlying conditions. “It was just COVID.”
Maddox wondered if the stress of Letlow’s COVID-19 infection in addition to “any medical procedure” he may have done “together resulted in a heart attack”.
Both doctors expressed sympathy for Letlow’s family and the health professionals who treated his illness.
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“It is a horrible trauma for the families involved … but it is also very traumatic for caregivers, because these are not people we are used to dying,” said Messerli. “So caring for a young man like this who is about to embark on a career in Congress and who died of this disease is tremendously emotionally traumatic.”
Maddox said there is still a lot that experts don’t know about the new virus that claimed more than 350,000 lives in the United States alone.
“Why sometimes it just rages like wildfire in young people we don’t know yet,” he said. “There has been some speculation that some people may be predisposed. When they get an infection, their immune system really goes crazy and almost goes beyond what is needed to fight the infection.”
“Why this would happen, there is no strong theory yet. We don’t understand it very well, and it may be someone’s genetic predisposition or other things,” he continued. “… There is no reliable way to know who would potentially have that answer and who would not, which is why the best strategy now is to say that everyone needs to take as much precaution as possible.”
Eight out of 10 COVID-19 deaths in the United States occurred in adults 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Adults aged 40 to 49 are three times more likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to die from the virus than a comparison group of adults between 18 and 29 years old.
A July study published in MedRxiv found that the infection mortality rate (IFR) increased from 0.01% among adults aged 25 to 0.4% at 55, 1.4% at 65, 4.6% at 75 and 15% at 85 Certain underlying medical conditions, however, can worsen cases of COVID-19.
It is still unclear why some young, healthy individuals experience severe symptoms and, occasionally, death. Experts have suggested that a healthy person’s genetic makeup may influence how individual bodies respond to the virus.