It’s not coronavirus but…: Blood clots from lungs damage other body organs, says study

LOMA LINDA California: A study has found that severely ill COVID-19 patients likely die as the result of micro clots formed in the lungs that spread to cause deadly damage to organs throughout the body. This finding from a recent study is different from the current understanding that the COVID-19 virus travels to the body’s organs and damages blood vessel lining in those organs. Loma Linda University Health researchers say once the clotting process begins, the body is no longer fighting against the virus but mostly against the clotting process instead. The American university’s findings, which may advance an understanding of the disease that has claimed four million lives and counting, also call for a shift in the nature of the search for effective therapeutic solutions.

“This could change our approach to fighting this disease because we may have been looking in the wrong place,” says Brian Bull, MD, a pathologist, former dean of the Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and the study’s first author. “We have been looking for a treatment against a viral disease, but we should now also look for therapy for a viral disease that has transformed into a clotting disorder.”

The study, “A macrophage attack culminating in microthromboses characterizes COVID 19 pneumonia,” published in the Journal of Immunity, Inflammation and Disease, proposes an explanation for why COVID-19 patients die from a vast array of conditions such as strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, or failure of several organs at the same time.

“We face the problem of not yet understanding the physiological disorders well enough to explain how a viral disease like COVID-19 kills people in such a diverse and difficult-to-predict fashion.” Bull says.

Bull and co-author Karen Hay contend that showers of tiny clots form and block micro-blood vessels in the bodies of many severely ill COVID-19 patients. Though invisible to the naked eye, the micro clots can damage and kill tiny portions of whichever organ tissue — brain, heart, liver, kidney, lung, etc. — the blocked blood vessels feed.

Although Bull and Hay found blood clotting was taking place by tracking the bio-markers and performing clotting tests, no visible clots were detected in any of the three patients. The likeliest explanation, Bull states, is that those clots were present but were too small to be seen.

“Here in this study we have three patients in which clearly a massive clotting disorder occurred over a very short period,” Bull says.

Bull says in a year and a half of searching for therapeutic modalities, the medical community has not come up with any anti-viral medications that have had a significant beneficial effect on COVID-19. Yet, heparin, an anti-clotting drug, not an anti-viral medication, has proven highly beneficial and is now being given to virtually all hospitalized, severely ill COVID-19 patients.

“Clotting in really sick COVID-19 patients is not something trivial and unimportant — it may well be fundamental to what is going on,” Bull says.