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This story originally appeared on STAT, a health and medicine website that provides ambitious coverage of the coronavirus. Go here for more stories on the virus. Try STAT Plus for exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences. And check out STAT’s COVID-19 tracker.   Two new studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that Covid-19 takes on the heart, raising the specter of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalization. One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than tw...

Coronavirus may leave the heart with lasting, dangerous damage, two new studies suggest.  It's become clear that the respiratory virus also attacks the cardiovascular system, as well as numerous other organs, including the kidneys and brain, but the new studies shed light on worrying damage to the heart itself.  One German study found that 78 percent of patients who recovered from COVID-19 were left with structural changes to their heart, and 76 of the 100 survivors showed signs of the kind of damage a heart attack leaves.  A second study, also conducted in Germany, found that more than half of people who died after contracting COVID-19 had high levels of the virus in their hearts.  It's not yet clear how long the damage might last, or how it might, in practice, increase survivors' risks ...

Two new studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that Covid-19 takes on the heart, raising the specter of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalization. One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflam...

A health worker collects a nasal swab from a man during a random testing for COVID-19 in Itagui, Columbia.Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento (Getty Images) Scientists might be closer to understanding one of the most common symptoms of even mild covid-19: the loss of smell and taste. A new study suggests that infection by the novel coronavirus can damage important cells that support the nerve cells responsible for relaying scent to the brain. The partial or full loss of smell, also known as anosmia, is occasionally caused by many respiratory infections, including covid-19. There’s even some evidence that anosmia is a more accurate predictor of having covid-19 than other well-known symptoms, like fever or dry cough. One mystery that has endured, though, is exactly how covid-19 leads to anosm...

"This article is really impressive ... and corresponds with our view that there's been a generational change," said child abuse pediatrician Dr. Robert Sege, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement on corporal punishment. "Younger people tend not to hit their children," said Sege, who was not involved in the new study. "As we've woken up to the issues of domestic violence and intimate partner violence there's been a growing rejection of any sort of violence within the home, including spanking." The new analysis used data from the Monitoring the Future study, a national survey of 25 consecutive groups of graduating high school seniors between 1993 and 2017. Each group was reassessed 17 years later, at about 35 years of age. The study excluded those without child...