Covid-19 attacks all areas of our bodies

Research finds few clues to how to treat patients

Posted 5/8/20

Experience is teaching health care givers that covid-19 can damage more than our lungs.

As  the number of those infected grows , doctors are learning it  can lead …

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Covid-19 attacks all areas of our bodies

Research finds few clues to how to treat patients

Posted

Experience is teaching health care givers that covid-19 can damage more than our lungs.

As the number of those infected grows, doctors are learning it can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome, a sometime fatal condition.

The disease can attack our brains, kidneys, hearts and vascular and digestive systems.

This is not meant to frighten you but to warn you about the danger to you and those you love.

Some patients have sudden strokes, pulmonary embolisms or heart-attack symptoms.

Others have kidney failure or gut inflammation.

Infection can affect the nervous system, causing seizures, hallucinations or a loss of smell and taste.

 It may affect pregnancies. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the placenta of a patient who miscarried during her second trimester tested positive for the virus and showed signs of inflammation.

Some children who generally don’t get sick have been hospitalized with symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease, a condition typically affecting children with acute heart and intestinal inflammation.

Physicians describe extensive and swift clotting leading to strokes and pulmonary embolisms in even young, healthy patients.

The complications make an estimated 10% to 20% of those infected severely ill.

Most who develop covid-19 experience relatively mild symptoms – fevers, coughs, chills, fatigue, nausea, diarrhea and, pinkeye.

Yet for a minority, ailments can quickly escalate to a more serious stage.

Figuring out how to treat patients with covid-19 is difficult.

The virus is new and its effects differ from other corona viruses.

Patients admitted to hospitals already very ill are harder to save .

No medications have yet been approved to treat the new virus.

Scientists are combing research and doctors are sharing experiences on social media.

They are finding that Immune-system cells rush in to kill infected cells.

They release molecules known as cytokines and chemokines that promote inflammation.

The inflammation’s goal is to cordon off infected tissue, but too much can do damag.

Inflammation in the lungs can starve the blood of oxygen, depriving other organs.

Inflammation of the heart muscle, called myocarditis, can cause chest pain, shortness of breath and heart-rhythm disorders and scar heart tissue.

A recent study in The Lancet found evidence the virus attacks endothelial cells, which form a layer lining blood vessels and the heart. That makes ovid-19 a vascular disease as well as a lung disease.

research, COVID-19, inflammation, heart, lungs, kidneys

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