New study in New England

artappraiser — Fri, 22 May 2020 03:25:04 +0000

In reply to Virus Hunter Describes His COVID Infection

New study in New England Journal of Medicine suggests it's the clotting and vascular factors that determine the worst outcomes

More evidence emerges on why covid-19 is so much worse than the flu

By Lenny Bernstein @ WashingtonPost.com, May 21, 2020 at 8:05 p.m. EDT

Researchers who examined the lungs of patients killed by covid-19 found evidence that it attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Critical parts of the lungs of patients infected by the novel coronavirus also suffered many microscopic blood clots and appeared to respond to the attack by growing tiny new blood vessels, the researchers reported.

The observations in a small number of autopsied lungs buttress reports from physicians treating covid-19 patients. Doctors have described widespread damage to blood vessels and the presence of blood clots that would not be expected in a respiratory disease.

“What’s different about covid-19 is the lungs don’t get stiff or injured or destroyed before there’s hypoxia,” the medical term for oxygen deprivation, said Steven J. Mentzer, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and part of the team that wrote the report. “For whatever reason, there is a vascular phase” in addition to damage more commonly associated with viral diseases such as the flu, he said.

The research team compared seven lungs of patients who died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with lung tissue from seven patients who died of pneumonia caused by the flu. They also examined 10 lungs donated for transplant but not used. The lungs, acquired in Europe, were matched by age and gender.

[....]

In larger blood vessels of the lungs, the number of blood clots was similar among covid-19 and flu patients, the researchers wrote. But in covid-19 patients, they found nine times as many micro-clots in the tiny capillaries of the small air sacs that allow oxygen to pass into the blood stream and carbon dioxide to move out. The virus may have damaged the walls of those capillaries and blocked the movement of those gases, the researchers wrote

[....]

Patients who do fairly well have a purely respiratory disease, and the patients who have trouble have a vascular component as well,” Mentzer said. But efforts to determine or explain who will fall into each group have not panned out, he said.

Highly recommended, I read

artappraiser — Thu, 21 May 2020 23:50:32 +0000

In reply to Virus Hunter Describes His COVID Infection

Highly recommended, I read this when it came out, I think I may have even posted it here, maybe as a comment somewhere. It really stuck with me much more than many other things I've read, he really gets across the seriousness and enormity of what we are dealing with here in a very personal way.

dagblog - Comments for "Virus Hunter Describes His COVID Infection"

New study in New England

Highly recommended, I read