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Coronavirus autopsies |
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Tabitha111
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Posted: July 02 2020 at 10:32am |
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/01/coronavirus-autopsies-findings/? Rapkiewicz, who directs autopsies at NYU Langone Health, noticed that some organs had far too many of a special 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. One of the first American investigations to be made public, on April 10, was out of New Orleans. The patient was a 44-year-old man who had been treated at LSU Health. Richard Vander Heide remembers cutting the lung and discovering what were probably hundreds or thousands of microclots. But as he moved onto the next patient and the next, Vander Heide saw the same pattern. He was so alarmed, he said, that he shared the paper online before submitting it to a journal so the information could be used immediately by doctors. “I could not remember a case before where we saw that,” she said. “It was remarkable they were in the heart." He [Isaac Solomon, a neuropathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston] found snippets of virus in only some areas [of the brain], and it was unclear whether they were dead remnants or active virus when the patient died. There were only small pockets of inflammation. But there were large swaths of damage due to oxygen deprivation. Whether the deceased were longtime intensive care patients or people who died suddenly, Solomon said, the pattern was eerily similar. “We were very surprised,” he said. The team from Mount Sinai Health, which took tissue findings from 20 brains, was also perplexed not to find a lot of virus or inflammation. However, the group noted in a paper that the widespread presence of tiny clots was “striking.” “If you have one blood clot in the brain, we see that all the time. But what we’re seeing is, some patients are having multiple strokes in blood vessels that are in two or even three different territories,” Fowkes [Mary Fowkes, an associate professor of pathology] said. |
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