One of the challenging aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic is the multitude of symptoms and its long-term effects. Some patients have reported experiencing severe vascular damage due to coronavirus, but physicians are unable to understand the mechanism that triggered this complication.
But a recent study from researchers of Tel Aviv University (TAU) described the five coronavirus proteins that are responsible for damaging blood vessels.
SARS-CoV-2 Damaging Blood Vessels
Despite being a respiratory disease, COVID-19 patients still experience blood vessel damage or sometimes neurological problems. An in-depth study by the National Institutes of Health researchers found hallmarks of thinning and leaky brain blood vessels in tissue samples from dead COVID-19 patients.
Moreover, they believe that the damage was not a direct viral attack because they did not see any signs of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the tissue samples.
NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) clinical director Dr. Avindra Nath said that COVID-19 patients must be susceptible to microvascular blood vessel damage, which suggests that the body's inflammatory response to the virus must have caused it.
Nath added that they hope their findings will help doctors understand the full spectrum of this particular complication, especially because it may also lead to strokes and neuropathologies. So, what caused the damage in the blood vessels of some patients? Tel Aviv University researchers have the answer for that.
Five Proteins Trigger Vascular Damage
SARS-CoV-2 is made up of 29 proteins, of which five were identified as damaging to blood vessels based on the findings of the study titled "Effect of Sars-Cov-2 Proteins on Vascular Permeability" published in the journal eLife.
The Times of Israel reported that researchers from Tel Aviv University had identified coronavirus proteins that are triggering strokes and heart attacks on some COVId-19 patients. Dr. Ben Maoz told the news outlet that they made the discovery by taking looking at the black box of the virus.
He explained that coronavirus is not purely a respiratory disease like how scientists first thought. Identifying the proteins that put patients at increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and other problems associated with the vascular system could help scientists develop drugs to counter this complication.
Aside from identifying which proteins harm blood vessels, the team was able to create a simulation of a human vascular system and observe how they exactly work. They found that these five proteins make vasculature leakier as the tubes become porous and unable to hold liquid as they should be.
This information is valuable in developing new drugs to treat this condition. Maoz and his team hope to lay the foundation for more treatment of COVId-19, noting that the virus today is treated as one entity despite affecting different parts of the body and in different ways.
"All the evidence shows that the virus severely damages the blood vessels or the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels. I hope that our research will prove useful in enabling more targeted treatment," he told The Times of Israel.
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