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An "alarming" percentage of student athletes with COVID-19 are also developing heart inflammation known as myocarditis, according to a Penn State doctor, though he later clarified that the percentage is not as high as he initially said. Wayne Sebastianelli, Penn State’s director of athletic medicine, said during a board meeting Monday night that around 30 percent of student athletes with COVID-19 who were given cardiac MRI's were found to have heart inflammation. (Sullivan, 9/3)

Penn State clarified a comment by an official who stated earlier this week that cardiac MRI scans revealed that roughly a third of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for the coronavirus and were scanned appeared to have myocarditis. The comment by Wayne Sebastianelli, the school’s director of athletic medicine, came Monday as he spoke to a local school board about high school preparations and precautions. According to a Penn State Health spokesman, Sebastianelli was speaking about “initial preliminary data that had been verbally shared by a colleague on a forthcoming study” and was not aware that it had been published, showing a rate of close to 15 percent among athletes, most of whom had experienced mild or no symptoms. Neither Sebastianelli nor Penn State conducted that study and he apologized for the confusion. (Boren, 9/3)

Maybe we should think of Covid-19 as a heart disease. When SARS-CoV-2 virus was added to human heart cells grown in lab dishes, the long muscle fibers that keep hearts beating were diced into short bits, alarming scientists at the San Francisco-based Gladstone Institutes, especially after they saw a similar phenomenon in heart tissue from Covid-19 patients’ autopsies. Their experiments could potentially explain why some people still feel short of breath after their Covid infections clear and add to worries that survivors may be at risk for future heart failure. (Cooney, 9/4)

Amarin failed to convince a federal appeals court to revive key patents covering its heart drug Vascepa. The decision, announced Thursday, exposes the company’s only drug to generic competition in the U.S. (Garde, 9/3)