Posts tagged "Covid-19"

More evidence that Covid-19 is a disease of clotting

A paper appeared yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine, adding to the growing body of evidence that clotting is a prominent feature in Covid-19, even if it isn’t always evident. People who develop difficulty breathing with influenza (“the flu”) or more run-of-the-mill pneumonias may look at first like they have similar shortness of breath to those with Covid-19, but this particular study details autopsy results of careful examination of the lungs in patients who have died from Covid-19 versus patients who have succumbed to influenza. The article can be accessed by clicking here.

For those without medical or scientific backgrounds, articles in The New England Journal can be difficult to decipher because of the medical terminology. However, it is worth translating for the public.

Perhaps the two sentences in the abstract (the brief summary of the study presented at the beginning of the paper to gain an overview) that stand out the most to me are: “Histologic analysis of pulmonary vessels in patients with Covid-19 showed widespread thrombosis with microangiopathy. Alveolar capillary microthrombi were 9 times as prevalent in patients with Covid-19 as in patients with influenza.”

Translation: The lungs of the patients who died secondary to Covid-19 had wide-spread clotting, nine times more blood clots and blockages in the thousands of small capillaries and blood vessels in their lungs, compared with the lungs of patients who died from influenza.

This could be why patients with Covid-19 go from talking to their healthcare providers in emergency departments to abruptly dying, and why so many who are on mechanical ventilators still don’t do well. It’s difficult to ventilate lungs that are full of blood clots. How can oxygen and carbon dioxide pass across the walls of blood vessels if these blood vessels are solidly, unabashedly blocked and blood is not flowing?

We have heard reports about young people with Covid-19 showing up with strokes. Reports of blood clots in arms/legs/fingers/toes are becoming more prevalent. This recent study confirms evidence at the cellular level that clotting is a feature of Covid-19.

Stroke emerging as complication of Covid-19

On April 28, 2020, a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine describing blood clots in large arteries supplying the brain (known as “large-vessel strokes”) in young patients testing positive for Covid-19 brought media attention to this particular facet of a disease physicians, healthcare providers, and researchers are endeavoring to understand. (Click here to read the brief NEJM letter.) The letter’s authors have been treating patients with Covid-19 in the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. They note that, on average, every two weeks their hospitals typically encounter 0.73 patients with large-vessel strokes who are under the age of 50, but within a two week period, they encountered five, and all were Covid-19 positive. It’s a small sample size, but the trend is concerning.

As time passes and more information is published about what this disease looks like in its various presentations, it seems to start in many patients as a respiratory illness, but when patients become ill with it, it is because it has transitioned into a disease involving blood clots and/or severe inflammation within the arteries. Report after report has emerged of patients who are awake and talking with emergency medicine physicians and healthcare providers, who then quite suddenly go into cardiac arrest and die. Stories of patients losing limbs and fingers/toes due to blood clots are emerging. Lungs are full of blood clots (pulmonary emboli) in many patients. Stroke is yet another complication of blood that easily and readily clots when the brain is the organ on the receiving end of that impact.

And now children, who were initially thought to be safe from Covid-19, with “mild” or no symptoms initially, are being reported as developing inflammation within their arteries and going into heart failure, in what is similar to a syndrome known as Kawasaki disease.

(Click here for a good mainstream media article summarizing various effects of Covid-19 in layman’s language.)

As for my own patients – what I am personally hearing from people who have experienced strokes in the past who have been infected more recently with Covid-19 is that they seem to be losing the progress they made previously through rehabilitation and time. Old stroke symptoms from their prior brain injuries are rearing their ugly heads again, and deficits that they thought were in their rearview mirrors have now arisen again. This can happen after a stroke with any bodily infection, whether it is a urinary tract infection or pneumonia, and is called recrudescence.

As businesses begin the reopening process, we are still seeing tens of thousands of new cases emerging daily in the United States, and the death count in this nation now exceeds 78,000. Mind you, this is the death count. We’re not talking about patients who survive Covid-19 with long-term scarring in their lungs, or those who have suffered limb amputations or disability associated with strokes. We also still do not know what the long-term toll of this disease is. It was only about seven months ago that this virus began infecting human beings, and we really don’t know what the long-term effects will look like a year, five years, or ten years down the road.

I’m not trying to be unnecessarily alarmist or cause panic. I care about our economy. I deeply care about jobs, livelihoods, and businesses. But as a physician, I am being real.

I also know that people who need to get back to work will not be successful in the work place long-term if they are trying to recover from the aftermath of strokes, or if they have long-term breathing problems because of the lung damage they have sustained. I am looking at the Covid-19 pandemic as a long-term battle, and do not want all of the sacrifices that have been made to fight it to be in vain if/when it just keeps returning.

I mentioned in my previous blog post that Dr. Anthony Fauci announced to the press in March that models were projecting deaths of 100,000 to 240,000 people in the US, and reporters argued with him in disbelief. They didn’t like it. They didn’t accept it. He basically said he hoped for a better outcome, but the numbers were what they were. We are getting closer to this estimated range each day.

We can feel emotionally impassioned, bored, scared, or beyond ready to resume life as we knew it only a few months ago.

But unfortunately, viruses don’t play by our rules.

Fear accompanies loss of control, in Covid-19 and in stroke

In 2012, I walked through a cemetery in Cashion, Oklahoma, eager to find the final resting places of my grandmother’s seven siblings and many other long since departed ancestors and relatives. My grandmother, Alta Jane Anderson, was still alive then, going strong in her assisted living facility in Houston, Texas at the age of 92, her mind as sharp as it had always been. She could talk March Madness brackets each year, still read a book every week or two, and never forgot the birthday of any of her children or their spouses, her seven grandchildren or their spouses, or of her 18 great-grandchildren.

When she suffered her ultimately fatal hemorrhagic stroke at 96 years old on my son’s third birthday, April 21, 2016, my aunt put her on the phone with me, and she said, clearly in pain and her speech heavily slurred, “Hi, Sweetie. Is Alexander having a good birthday?” How in the world did she have the mental clarity or compassion in that moment to ask me that, instead of being concerned for herself? To this day, she carries the distinction of being the person containing the most genuine goodness within her of anyone I have ever known.

My final visit with my grandmother, 2016

As I walked through this sleepy rural graveyard, I called Granny on my cell phone, unsure of where to begin in my search for departed family members. Her voice lit up at the sound of mine, as it always did when any of her family called, and then she verbally navigated me to the correct area to pay my respects. Granny was born in 1919, and as I saw the grave stone of her older sister, Lottie, and the year of her death (1918, at age 20), the reality of my grandmother having never met her older sister enclosed around me. Lottie’s three month old infant son was buried next to her, having perished only four days before his mother.

I asked my grandmother what took both of their lives at such young ages. Her reply sounded like something out of a dusty history textbook, from a time in the very remote past: “It was the Spanish flu.”

(Interestingly, this pandemic received its nickname because the Spanish press was free to cover the impact of this flu, not because it originated in Spain.)

After finding other family grave sites, I wandered over to a shaded area beneath the canopy of a beautiful tree, and Granny and I proceeded to have a conversation about the great influenza pandemic of 1918. She recounted her mother’s stories of how her family could not have a proper funeral for Lottie and her son because of the fear around group gatherings, and the fear others had of catching this deadly flu. Burials were significantly delayed because of the high number of deaths within a short period of time, and local undertakers became overwhelmed.

As I sat in the cemetery on that gorgeous Oklahoma spring day, I distinctly remember having this thought: Thank goodness we live in the age of modern medicine and don’t have to live through the heartbreak of such a pandemic.

After all – the influenza pandemic of 1918 occurred during a time when only black and white photos were taken, almost a decade before the first “talking” movie premiered. We had advanced so far past that era.

As I write these words today on April 15, 2020, 33 days after schools shut down in Durham, North Carolina and group gatherings suspended, stemming from the same fears of more than a century ago, they seem naive. Even as a physician at that time, I was operating under the assumption that modern medicine could protect us from another pandemic. I knew that clinical trials and the development of vaccines take years to complete, but at that time, it seemed even to me that our technology, medicine, and people could spare us from another such pandemic of large magnitude.

And I still certainly hope that is the case. That historic pandemic took the lives of at least 50 million people worldwide, 675,000 of which were in the United States when its population was smaller than it is today.

Yet, despite our modern medicine, and brave, highly educated, and experienced doctors and healthcare providers on the front lines delivering care, the mortality rate as of the latest reported data in the United States from Covid-19 complications is at 4.2% (26,977 deaths and 617,628 cases – likely an underestimate of cases but an overestimate of the percentage of infections who die, given the lack of testing in people with mild or absent symptoms).

There is a fear that accompanies the Covid-19 pandemic such that most people have not witnessed anything like it in their lifetimes. I have, however, witnessed it in mine, on the faces of patients for whom I have cared who have suffered strokes at relatively young ages. I have seen numerous individuals who unexpectedly, while going through life in their primes, are stricken with a disease they thought only possible in older or unhealthier people. In particular, when a specific cause for the stroke cannot be identified, many of them initially live in daily fear, wondering if and when it will happen again.

Their fear stems from the unknown, and from the lack of control they have in their situations. Many of these healthy young people have asked me, “How is my cholesterol doing?” When I would inform them that their cholesterol had nothing to do with their strokes, often the question that would follow would be something to the effect of: “So what can I do not to have another one then?”

When Covid-19 existed primarily in China, much of the chatter in the western world among younger and healthier people involved words to reassure themselves that they would be safe, such as: “It’s really only older people and people with weak immune systems who die from this.” While older and immunocompromised patients are in the higher-risk categories for perishing from Covid-19, it didn’t stop the alarm many felt when stories began emerging of healthy young people who had succumbed to the disease. The 30 year old school teacher in New Jersey. The 39 year old disc jockey in Florida. The 17 year old in California. Eventually we learned that up to half of patients ending up in intensive care were under age 65. This did not fit our current ideas about flu, pneumonia, or any other passing viral contagious diseases to which we have become accustomed as a society. How, then, to ease the fear and gain a sense of control again?

What I have witnessed in stroke care since becoming a vascular neurologist in 2010 has been very similar. How do we explain it when a healthy 25 year old dies unexpectedly and quickly from a stroke when she had her whole life ahead of her? Is there a way of ever feeling in control again after witnessing such a thing?

Recently, I observed Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now-familiar face of the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, speaking at a press conference, explaining that models were projecting a “best case scenario” of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States from Covid-19 if social distancing continued. Members of the press immediately launched critically into him. What they seemed to be saying was…we don’t accept that. That’s not right. He kept looking back at them, reiterating that the numbers were suggesting this, that he hoped for a better outcome with continued social distancing, but this is what the numbers suggested at that time, and that he was merely the messenger of this news. They argued with him. They didn’t like it.

As I watched, I thought – so many people in this country have not faced death. They have not seen the fear on a patient’s face as he or she wonders if today is his or her final day. This is the first time in the lives of millions of people when they have truly had to confront the question of how much time they have remaining, and they, understandably, find this distressing.

I have written before on The Stroke Blog about how I try to live my life to the fullest each day, not knowing if each day will be my last, because I have seen so many young people who think they have decades in front of them, only to find themselves struck unexpectedly with disability or death. It led me to a telemedicine career in 2018 so that I could savor my days with my children while they are still young, so they can remember their mother if that last day does arrive earlier than expected. It has led me to reflect on why stroke-related deaths in “young” celebrities impact us emotionally. Two years ago, stroke survivor Brett Patterson shared his story of searching for answers as to why he had a brain hemorrhage in his 20’s. He would be the first to tell you that he lives each day now with gratitude and perspective since that time, understanding that each day counts.

Silver linings exist in each human tragedy, as difficult as they may be to find. In the case of the Covid-19 story, perhaps a silver lining is bringing perspective to millions about the fragility of life such that we can learn to appreciate our days here, and understand what young stroke survivors have already known about the importance of making each day count. It’s the understanding that we can and should follow the recommendations of public health officials to prevent the spread of the virus and save as many lives as possible, but to find joy in the everyday-ness of life. Knowing that the ordinary is extraordinary. Having a conversation with a neighbor. Dining in a restaurant. Taking kids to school. Birthday parties. Working. Life.

Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us, global pandemic or not.