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Medical: Autopsies find blood clots in “almost every organ” in COVID victims

Introversion

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https://fox8.com/news/pathologist-found-blood-clots-in-almost-every-organ-during-autopsies-on-covid-19-patients/

Fox8 said:
Autopsies on people who died of the coronavirus are helping doctors understand how the disease affects the body — and one of the most remarkable findings concerned blood clotting, a pathologist says.

Dr. Amy Rapkiewicz, the chairman of the department of pathology at NYU Langone Medical Center, spoke to Erin Burnett on OutFront Thursday night.

Some Covid-19 patients are known to develop blood clotting issues, but the degree and the extent to which that occurs was described as “dramatic” by Rapkiewicz.

In the early stages of the pandemic, bedside clinicians noticed a lot of blood clotting “in lines and various large vessels,” she said.

“What we saw at autopsy was sort of an extension of that,” she said. “The clotting was not only in the large vessels but also in the smaller vessels.

“And this was dramatic, because though we might have expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ that we looked at in our autopsy study,” she said. Rapkiewicz’s study outlining her findings was published at the end of June in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.

The autopsies also showed something unusual about megakaryocytes, or large bone marrow cells. They usually don’t circulate outside the bones and lungs, Rapkiewicz said.

“We found them in the heart and the kidneys and the liver and other organs,” she said. “Notably in the heart, megakaryocytes produce something called platelets that are intimately involved in blood clotting.”

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Roxxsmom

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This is just nasty. It's looking more and more like Covid-19 is a blood disease.

So my question is why do these massive clots develop in some patients and not others? Are there correlates that go beyond age? Are factors like inflammation, genetics, even things as mundane as blood type, involved? I've heard that type Os seem more resistant to the disease and type As are more vulnerable to severe cases. They don't really discuss differences between Bs and ABs or whether those are at some kind of baseline risk. How do they even determine baseline risk independently of blood type, when so many people are either A or O?

And if clotting is part of the morbidity associated with severe cases of Covid-19, would treating with anticoagulants be helpful? Have people on blood thinners for other conditions been shown to be at less risk for severe complications if they develop covid-19, or are the underlying conditions they are on the blood thinners for going to negate that? Or are the blood clots simply a symptom of something even more sinister going on?
 
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So much we don’t yet understand about it!

It does sound anecdotally like blood thinners are often given to hospitalized COVID patients now? At least, I’ve seen people on reddit who claim to be medical professionals, who say this is being done.