HAMILTON: Blood thinners do reduce clotting, and other drugs can often dissolve a clot before it causes major damage. And we were finding that the machines were clotting two or three or four times a day. And that includes people on dialysis, which he finds surprising.ĬOOPERSMITH: Patients on dialysis in the intensive care unit with COVID - patients on that are on blood thinners, and the dialysis machines almost never clot. But he says clotting problems are affecting a significant minority of patients in the ICU. HAMILTON: Coopersmith says he hasn't seen the sort of stroke patients reported in New York - young people without risk factors. Craig Coopersmith is the interim director of the Critical Care Center at Emory University in Atlanta.ĬRAIG COOPERSMITH: Patients who are in the intensive care unit for other diseases are at risk of having clots but nothing like the levels that we're seeing in COVID-19. COVID-19 seems to produce blood clots - a lot of them. HAMILTON: The letter supports something other doctors have observed since the pandemic began in China. MOCCO: These were five patients in their 30s and 40s who did not have the typical risk-factor profile but did have the SARS-CoV-2 virus. HAMILTON: Mocco and a group of doctors thought it was time to sound the alarm, so they described five stroke patients in a letter that appears today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Speaking with the renal doctors and the dialysis doctors, they were seeing clots in the renal arteries causing kidney injury. MOCCO: Speaking with the ICU doctors and the pulmonary doctors, they were seeing clots in the lungs. The young woman had none of the usual risk factors for stroke, but she tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19, so Mocco and other doctors began to compare notes.
J MOCCO: We had a young woman in her early 30s who came in with a profound stroke, the kind of stroke that leaves someone permanently paralyzed and possibly unable to survive. Mocco directs the Cerebrovascular Center at Mount Sinai. JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: When the coronavirus arrived in New York, hospital emergency rooms began to see some unusual stroke patients. As NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, the disease appears to thicken the blood, which can lead to clots that affect the lungs and kidney and to strokes that damage the brain. Now the emerging link between COVID-19 and life-threatening blood clots.
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