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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCoronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs, and 42 hearts
https://www.boston.com/news/health/2020/07/01/covid-autopsiesWhen pathologist Amy Rapkiewicz began the grim process of opening up the coronavirus dead to learn how their bodies went awry, she found damage to the lungs, kidneys and liver consistent with what doctors had reported for months.
But something was off.
Rapkiewicz, who directs autopsies at NYU Langone Health, noticed that some organs had far too many of a special type of cell rarely found in those places. She had never seen that before, yet it seemed vaguely familiar. She raced to her history books and in a eureka moment found a reference to a 1960s report on a patient with dengue fever.
In dengue, a mosquito-borne tropical disease, she learned, the virus appeared to destroy these cells, which produce platelets, leading to uncontrolled bleeding. The novel coronavirus seemed to amplify their effect, causing dangerous clotting.
*snip.
CaliforniaPeggy
(149,791 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,069 posts)Botany
(70,639 posts)"Our leaders decided to politicize a scientific issue ..."
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213686826
A bit off the topic but we would not being going through this crap with a President Hillary
Clinton for a number of reasons the least of which being that she would not have fired the
Pandemic Response team, the CDC's epidemiologist in Wuhan, or disbanded Obama's multi-
national pandemic strike team called PREDICT.
not fooled
(5,805 posts)some (much smaller) number of Americans died, the GOPee would be howling uncontrollably.
bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)Well this is horrifying.
bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)yortsed snacilbuper
(7,941 posts)a study out this month in the Lancets eClinicalMedicine, found abnormal clotting in the heart, kidney, liver, as well as the lungs of seven patients, leading the authors to suggest this may be a major cause of the multiple-organ failure in covid-19 patients.
crickets
(25,990 posts)dalton99a
(81,700 posts)If you have one blood clot in the brain, we see that all the time. But what were seeing is some patients are having multiple strokes in blood vessels that are in two or even three different territories, Fowkes said.
Rapkiewicz said it is too early to know whether the newest batch of autopsy findings can be translated into treatment changes, but the information has opened new avenues to explore. One of her first calls after noticing the unusual platelet-producing cells was to Jeffrey Berger, a cardiac specialist at NYU who runs a National Institutes of Health-funded lab that focuses on platelets.
Berger said the autopsies suggest anti-platelet medications, in addition to blood thinners, may be helpful to stem the effects of covid-19. He has pivoted a major clinical trial looking at optimal doses of anticoagulants to look at that question as well.
JudyM
(29,294 posts)early diagnostic screening for Covid.
Keep one on hand at home and routinely check to see if your pulse ox is getting low, if you have any public exposure.