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Does height influence the level of covid-19 infections? 1:48
(CNN) - The new coronavirus can infect organs throughout the body, including the lungs, throat, heart, liver, brain, kidneys and intestines, researchers reported Wednesday.
Two separate reports suggest that the virus goes far beyond the lungs and can attack various organs, findings that may help explain the wide range of symptoms caused by covid-19 infection.
The findings could help explain some of the puzzling symptoms seen in coronavirus patients, including the appearance of blood clots that cause strokes in younger people and clog dialysis machines, headaches, and kidney failure.
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Covid-19 is classified as a respiratory virus and is transmitted through respiratory droplets, but it can also sometimes cause diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms. Researchers have found evidence of the virus in patients' stools and warn that it can be transmitted through what is known as the fecal-oral route.
For one of the studies, Jie Zhou and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong wanted to see how well the virus can flourish in the intestines. They grew intestinal organoids - laboratory versions of the organs - from both bats and people. They showed that the virus not only lived on these organoids, it replicated.
"The human intestinal tract could be a transmission route for SARS-CoV-2," the team wrote in their report, published in Nature Medicine.
They also found viruses capable of infecting cells in feces taken from a covid-19 patient.
"A 68-year-old patient developed a fever, a sore throat, and a productive cough and developed diarrhea after her admission to Princess Margaret Hospital," Zhou and colleagues wrote. "We isolate infectious viruses from their stool sample," they added.
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"Here we demonstrate the active replication of SARS-CoV-2 in human intestinal organoids and the isolation of infectious virus from the stool sample of a patient with diarrheal covid-19."
Separately, a team from the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Medical Center in Germany performed autopsies on 27 patients who died from covid-19. They found the virus in a variety of organs.
"SARS-CoV-2 can be detected in multiple organs, including the lungs, pharynx, heart, liver, brain, and kidneys," they wrote in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The virus seemed to work especially well in the kidneys, they wrote, something that could explain the high rate of kidney injury seen among covid-19 patients.
The virus's ability to attack multiple organs could aggravate pre-existing conditions, they added. People with heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease are especially vulnerable to the new coronavirus.
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