Doctors said Wednesday that blood thinning medications could help save some patients suffering from severe COVID-19.
The findings of the Mount Sinai Hospital team could help address a worrying problem that has challenged doctors treating coronavirus patients around the world. These are blood clots throughout the body that complicate an already difficult-to-treat disease.
A team of researchers now says they are conducting experiments to see which anticoagulants may work best, and at what doses.
- Patients who received anticoagulants did better than those who did not, said Dr. Valentin Fuster, director of Mount Sinai Heart and chief physician of The Mount Sinai Hospital, to CNN.
- I think people should treat these patients with anticoagulants, he added. The findings are not yet clear enough to make solid recommendations. The team noted that patients who were already seriously ill were more likely to receive blood-thinning medications.
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Dr. Fuster and his team analyzed 2,700 patients treated in New York. Since March, some patients have been receiving anticoagulant medications based on decisions made by their doctors. The team began to systematically check that the drugs were meaningful.
- Our findings suggest that systemic anticoagulants may be associated with better outcomes in patients hospitalized with Covid-19, wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The researchers did not find that patients who received blood thinning medications had a significantly higher rate of bleeding problems - one of the risks of medications. Different patients have had different dosages and different types of blood thinners, so it will be important to systematically find out which combination of dose and drug works best.
Fuster would also like to investigate whether blood thinning medications can help patients who are not sick enough to be hospitalized. Some hospitals have reported a worrying increase in the number of strokes among people under the age of 50 whonormally they would not be endangered. Many of these patients later became infected with the coronavirus.
It's not yet clear why the virus causes blood clotting, but increased clotting could be a side effect of severe inflammation from some viral infections.