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THE NUANCE
Aspirin May Treat Severe Covid-19 Disease, and
That Tells Us Something Important
Aspirin may turn out to be a cheap and effective way to save lives and prevent
lasting damage
G& Verknam Heid Nov - S min read »
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ack in April, when the first wave of Covid-19 was crashing across the U.S.,
Michael Mazzeffi received an email from one of his colleagues at the
University of Maryland Medical Center.
“One of our surgeons said that when he was drawing blood out of a patient, it
literally clotted within five seconds,” says Mazzeffi, who is chief of the division of
critical care anesthesiology. “It was pretty clear early on that patients with severe
Covid had clotting disorders and that their blood was super coagulable.”
Clinicians around the world noticed this same clotting phenomenon. By mid-
summer, autopsies of people who had died from Covid-19 revealed that their
vasculature and organs were often suffused with clots and coagulated blood. “What
we saw in the Covid ICU is that a lot of the patients would start developing a lot of
clotting, and this high burden would lead to multi-organ failure and eventually
death,” says Jonathan Chow, MD, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at the
University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Because clotting seemed to be a signature of severe or damaging Covid-19 disease,
Chow and Mazzeffi started to discuss whether aspirin — a blood-thinning drug that
Colin Lessell MB BS (Lond) BDS (Lond) MRCS (Eng) LRCP (Lond) FBHomDA DDFHom HonFHMA, Colin B. Lessell - The Complementary Formulary - A Guide For Prescribers (2001)