Consistently, our study also found 19.7% of patients with cardiac injury and first demonstrated that cardiac injury was independently associated with an increased risk of mortality in patients with COVID-19.

After adjusting for age, preexisting cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, coronary heart disease, and chronic heart failure), cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, renal failure, cancer, ARDS, creatinine levels greater than 133 μmol/L, and NT-proBNP levels greater than 900 pg/mL, the multivariable adjusted Cox proportional hazard regression model showed a significantly higher risk of death in patients with cardiac injury than in those without cardiac injury, either during time from symptom onset (hazard ratio [HR], 4.26 [95% CI, 1.92-9.49]) or time from admission to study end point (HR, 3.41 [95% CI, 1.62-7.16]) (Table 3).

The mortality rate was higher among patients with vs without cardiac injury (42 [51.2%] vs 15 [4.5%]; P < .001) as shown in Table 2 and the Kaplan-Meier survival curves in Figure 2. The mortality rate increased in association with the magnitude of the reference value of hs-TNI