COVID-19 has posed many challenges to our health and our economy, making it difficult for people to cope with job loss, home isolation, and other health factors. It is almost when the vaccine has been transmitted to several parts of the world where it affected the population.
COVID-19 showed many unknown symptoms in people and put the experts initially in a dilemma about making an accurate diagnosis of a condition. One of the common symptoms in people with severe COVID-19 infection was blood clotting, leading to stroke and cardiac arrest in many patients. But recent research and analysis showed that figures represented a higher risk of bleeding and death in COVID-19 patients hospitalized in extreme conditions.
Usually, blood clotting in a person happens when he/she is injured. At this very particular time, due to blood clotting, there are also chances of the blocking of blood vessels leading to severe consequences too. Our body can manage the blood clotting breaking activity by controlling plasminogen- a protein in the blood.
Two other proteins manage the blood activity levels- tissue plasminogen activator for breaking away the blood clot by activating plasminogen, and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 for causing a blood clot and blocking blood vessels. These blood activity mechanisms are essential to understand the research that established the idea that COVID-19 patients showed a higher risk of bleeding.
The Research and Findings
The previous researches on COVID-19 patients showed that those of the patients who were admitted to hospitals due to their severe condition suffered from blood clotting, which leads them to experience stroke, cardiac arrest, etc.,
Experts found that COVID-19 patients suffered from blood clotting because they had sticky and thick blood. Doctors then applied the treatment such as anticoagulation therapy that helped these patients with blood clots by injecting blood thinners. But what went wrong is this therapy did not work the same in all the patients.
Researchers at Michigan Medicine and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor initiated a study on this finding. They aimed to find out the exact malfunction in the protein levels in the blood responsible for managing blood clot levels and clot breaking of blood in a person.
The researchers from Michigan Medicine and the University of Michigan went further to measure the levels of both the proteins, tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 in 118 patients severely affected by COVID-19 as well as 30 healthy people.
The result of this measurement showed that both the protein levels were high in COVID patients, especially TPA levels that showed a higher risk of mortality in these COVID patients. Researchers also lab tested these blood samples as they added thrombin enzyme in the blood, which would cause clotting in these blood cells.
The researchers then observed it and found that the TPA levels were so high in these cOVID patient blood samples that it prevented the thrombin from causing clothing; instead enhanced the breaking away of the blood clot.
The Conclusion and Limitation
The researchers also said that it is not just the COVID patients critically ill who are exposed to the risk of the high amount of TPA protein and risk of bleeding in them. Still, it is also necessary that the other less critical patients of COVID who are hospitalized must be another sub-group on whom this study must be conducted to measure the risk of bleeding in them.
The doctors who previously applied anti-coagulation therapy on every covid patient must make the selection cautiously now as it could do more harm than good. But this study has its limitation in terms of the control applied in the study. The researchers did not correctly match the controls of age and gender with the patients.
Moreover, the scientists said that there was one more protein involved in the functioning of blood clotting and bleeding factor, which is known as urokinase. Since the researchers did not add urokinase measurement, the study lacks the difference of its role with TPA in COVID-19 patients. Hence this study also has its limitation and requires more investigation to confirm something.
