Now, researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Heersink School of Medicine have identified a bacterial enzyme that may be the reason some people get heart complications with pneumonia, while others do not.

Since enzymes create chemical reactions to help bacteria survive, grow, and sometimes attack tissues, the researchers understood this particular enzyme, named zmpB, could become a target for future vaccines or drug therapies. They published their findings in Cell Reports.

“About one in five people hospitalized with pneumonia will suffer a life-threatening adverse cardiac event and, even in the years following, are at least twice as likely to experience some form of heart failure,” said the study’s lead author Carlos J. Orihuela, Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.