A new study suggests patients hospitalized with pneumonia may be at serious risk of new or worsening heart problems. The study is published in the July 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, currently available online. Researchers led by Daniel Musher, MD, studied the records of all 170 patients hospitalized with pneumococcal pneumonia at a Texas Veterans Affairs medical center from 2001 to 2005. They found that 19.4 percent of them had a heart attack or other major heart problem concurrently at the time of admission, and that the presence of the heart condition significantly increased mortality from pneumonia.
