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Pathologists found blood clots in 'almost all organs' during autopsies of patients with covid-19

2020-07-10T22:38:01.334Z


Autopsies on people who died of the coronavirus are helping doctors understand how the disease affects the body, and one of the most important findings concerns coagul ...


Blood clots in patients with coronavirus 2:29

(CNN) - Autopsies on people who died of the coronavirus are helping doctors understand how the disease affects the body, and one of the most important findings concerns blood clotting, a pathologist says.

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

Some covid-19 patients are known to develop blood clotting problems, but Rapkiewicz described the extent and extent to which this occurs as "dramatic."

In the early stages of the pandemic, GPs noticed a large number of blood clots "in several large vessels," he said.

"What we saw at the autopsy was a kind of extension of that," he said. "Coagulation was not just in the large vessels but also in the smaller vessels."

"And this was dramatic, because while we might have expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ we observed in our autopsy study," he said. Rapkiewicz's study describing her findings was published in late June in The Lancet EClinicalMedicine.

Blood clots in patients with coronavirus 2:29

Autopsies also showed something unusual about megakaryocytes, or large bone marrow cells. They generally don't circulate outside the bones and lungs, Rapkiewicz said.

"We find them in the heart, the kidneys, the liver and other organs," he said. "Notably in the heart, megakaryocytes produce something called platelets that are intimately involved in blood clotting."

The researchers hope to discover how these cells influence small vessel coagulation in Covid-19, he said.

LOOK: Blood clots filled the lungs of black people who were victims of the new coronavirus, according to study

Pathologists have been surprised by something they did not find.

During the early stages of the pandemic, doctors thought the virus would cause inflammation of the heart with myocarditis, he said.

But autopsies have found very low incidents of myocarditis, Rapkiewicz said.

She said that one of the "opportunities, if there is one" is that pathologists have had the opportunity to examine the organs of many Covid-19 victims and investigate the disease processes that take place. She said that opportunity was not really available with H1N1 or the original SARS outbreak.

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2020-07-10

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