Covid-19 mainly causes respiratory symptoms, yet autopsies performed on people who have died from the disease show that the virus is ” able to spread throughout the body “. A group of researchers connected to the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is headquartered in Bethesda in the United States, performed 44 analyses postmortem on unvaccinated patients who died in hospital and researched the presence of SARS-coV-2 throughout the human body. The chosen patients ranged in age from 40 to 70 years and had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 for 8 to 18.5 days at the time of death.
Scientists have confirmed the presence of the coronavirus in 84 different anatomical sites, both tissues and biological fluids. The respiratory system remains the organ group most affected by the viral infection, but the coronavirus has also been found in the eyes, skin, muscles and even the brain. These results appeared in Nature.
Coronavirus present from head to toe
Of the 44 bodies available to scientists, brain samples were only possible on 11 of them. In 90% of cases, the coronavirus was present in the brain, particularly in the hypothalamus and cerebellum for patients who died of a particularly virulent infection, and in the cervical spinal cord as well as in the basal ganglia (a deep brain structure) in patients for whom the infection was longer.
This research shows that, if the coronavirus preferentially replicates in the respiratory sphere, it can spread throughout the body. The subgenomic RNA of the coronavirus (a type of RNA produced only during active replication of the virus) has been isolated from almost all analyzed tissues and in some biological fluids such as plasma or fluid accumulated in the lungs following disease (pleural fluid ). Scientists have also managed to reculture SARS-CoV-2 virions isolated from the heart, lymph nodes or even the digestive tract of autopsy patients. This suggests that regions of the body other than the respiratory sphere may act as a “virus factory”.
This study improves our understanding of the spread of the coronavirus in the human body. However, it was done on patients who died between 2020 and 2021, so before the Omicron subvariants appeared – the latter may have a different behavior. In addition, 60% of people undergoing autopsy had various comorbidities that could influence the spread of the virus in the body.
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