Great video from MedCram discussing what they are seeing in their ICU.

Discussed the case of a 72-year-old male who was otherwise relatively healthy. They tracked his D-dimer over the course of a lengthy hospital stay and despite prophylactic doses of LMWH the D-dimer continued to elevate. They were able to test for factor VIII and VW factor, both quite high. He was started on a drip of unfractionated heparin and the D-dimer dropped very quickly over the course of a few days.

What they are thinking is the virus, before it even causes major respiratory distress, is binding to the endothelial ACE2, causing a release of clotting factors VW and VIII. This may explain why people are prone to developing multiple blood clots and are at higher risk for stroke, MI, and PE. Is it possible that early use of heparin drips could reduce risk of death (or even the need for critical care) in hospitalized patients?

In layman's terms... does this mean anything?

Things to take or avoid?

It looks like, based on hospital data, the people who are more prone to suffer deadly effects from this are the people who are diabetic, morbidly obese, and/or have cardiovascular disease.

However, there are a lot of anecdotal reports of younger patients suffering strokes and having potential long-term issues related to organ dysfunction. I would wager a guess that a lot of the organ dysfunction may be related to infarcts, but that would be just a guess.

Interesting.

Thanks for posting.

Some of the MDs on this board have stated that they are anticoagulating many hospitalized patients early in their stay so I think this theory is being supported out on the front lines.