For three weeks, doctors across the country treating patients infected with covid-19 have detected that another effect of the virus on the human body has been the unusual presence of blood clots.
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“I was in a webinar session and everyone started saying that I was seeing the same thing (blood clots in patients); it was when we realized that it was happening in different ICUs in the country, ”Craig Coopersmith, a surgeon from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) who works in one of 10 hospitals in the University’s health system, told Univision News Emory in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Coopersmith said 20% of patients in ICUs were on dialysis, so their kidneys failed with covid-19, although they did not specify the number of people subject to observation.
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“Typically, these patients’ blood pressure is low, and they’re basically taking blood thinners, so the machines used in the dialysis process warn of the clot, even though the patients had been given blood thinners,” he said.
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Doctors from ICU units of New York, North Carolina, Washington or CaliforniaThey later analyzed heart failure patients who had covid-19, but concluded that they were actually suffering from what would be inflammation of the heart.
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“When we looked at ultrasound, we saw that This heart failure comes from clots that cause failure of the right ventricle.; then we start looking for clots and then we start to see a lot of clots in people’s legs, much more than we could expect, ”said Coopersmith. “So we saw several different ways that clots manifest, and we also saw clotting at autopsies, and when you put all of that together, we realized that it’s not just one ICU, it happens literally in every ICU of all the states”.
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Coopersmith said the reality they face is “Surprising and different”, which is why doctors are already prepared to see the formation of blood clots in covid-19 patients who are in the Intensive Care Units.
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A new challenge for science
The presence of blood clots is being so common in severe covid-19 cases that doctors define this as a new clotting pattern called covid-19 associated coagulopathy, or CAC, which is remarkably associated with high inflammatory markers in the blood. , such as D-dimer and fibrinogen.
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“More and more cases of patients with blood clots are being seen,” pulmonologist Carlos Makalali of Beverly Hospital in Montebello, California told Univision News. “We are applying blood thinners to patients as a preventive measure, depending on age, mobility and medical history; the important thing is to always be monitoring the patient because there can be a blood stroke in the brain ”.
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The exact cause of increased blood clotting in covid-19 patients remains unclear and is as new as the virus, although doctors believe it to be due to severe inflammation of the human body, fluids, and respiratory system stress.
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“Until now we don’t know exactly what is causing these complications,” Dr. Yulsi Fernández Montero, an internal medicine specialist at the Martin Luther King Jr. Commmunity Medical Group in Los Angeles, California, told Univision News. “One theory is that the virus is wreaking havoc on the body that is difficult to detect and, for example, if a person is lying in a hospital bed for a long time and there is not much movement, they have a higher risk of developing blood clots ”.
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“Coronavirus is a viral disease that can attack you lightly or seriously and both the airways and other parts of the body will suffer because it is a systemic disease,” said the expert.
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“And if you have a severe viral syndrome, your whole body will suffer and different reactions will occur, not just blood clots,” he added. “What happens is that people only want to hear that the coronavirus stays in the lungs and that the rest of the body is intact, and that is not true; once you are sick the virus is in your blood, and from there the blood runs to the lungs, kidneys, head, nose, etc. what happens is that this covid-19 is more aggressive than other viruses due to the speed with which it is transmitted ”.
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