COVID19 and Finding Effective Medical Therapies

This post introduces a column I wrote over at TheHeart.org | Medscape Cardiology — The good news is that most people infected with coronavirus don’t need a hospital or doctor. But some do. Some get very ill. The maddening thing is that doctors don’t have an effective treatment for the virus. There are no cures. The Worldmeter today shows nearly 5 million infections and more than 300,000 deaths. And no effective therapy. Excluding a possibly modest effect of Remdesivir, our care is supportive, which is medical jargon for giving simple things like oxygen, acetaminophen, IV fluids and letting the body do the rest. That sentence makes supportive care seem simple, but it is not so with COVID19. The virus can cause havoc in the body. Damage to the lungs (pneumonia) gets most of the attention, but other organs can be harmed. COVID19 and Clotting: One system in particular that can go haywire is the clotting system (medical term is coagulation). Many studies have shown that patients ill with COVID19 can have excess clotting. (It’s not well known, but our bodies do this elegant dance to keep the blood clotting factors and thinning factors in balance. Medical people call this equilibrium or homeostasis of the coagulation system.) We now have blood tests that give us a window, albeit a somewhat opaque one, onto the clotting system. Also imperfect is the observation that patients with COVID19 can clot off intravenous lines, or on a...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs