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Postmortem Cardiopulmonary Pathology in Patients with COVID-19 Infection: Single-Center Report of 12 Autopsies from Lausanne, Switzerland

We report postmortem cardio-pulmonary findings including detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue in 12 patients with COVID-19. The 5 women and 7 men (median age: 73 years; range 35–96) died 6–38 days after onset of symptoms...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Berezowska, Sabina, Lefort, Karine, Ioannidou, Kalliopi, Ndiaye, Daba-Rokhya, Maison, Damien, Petrovas, Constantinos, Rotman, Samuel, Piazzon, Nathalie, Milowich, Dina, Sala, Nathalie, Tsai, Chun-Yi, Multone, Eleonore, Bochud, Pierre-Yves, Oddo, Mauro, Bisig, Bettina, de Leval, Laurence
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34441292
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics11081357
Descripción
Sumario:We report postmortem cardio-pulmonary findings including detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue in 12 patients with COVID-19. The 5 women and 7 men (median age: 73 years; range 35–96) died 6–38 days after onset of symptoms (median: 14.5 days). Eight patients received mechanical ventilation. Ten patients showed diffuse alveolar damage (DAD), 7 as exudative and 3 as proliferative/organizing DAD. One case presented as acute fibrinous and organizing pneumonia. Seven patients (58%) had acute bronchopneumonia, 1/7 without associated DAD and 1/7 with aspergillosis and necrotic bronchitis. Microthrombi were present in 5 patients, only in exudative DAD. Reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR detected high virus amounts in 6 patients (50%) with exudative DAD and symptom-duration ≤14 days, supported by immunohistochemistry and in-situ RNA hybridization (RNAscope). The 6 patients with low viral copy levels were symptomatic for ≥15 days, comprising all cases with organizing DAD, the patient without DAD and one exudative DAD. We show the high prevalence of DAD as a reaction pattern in COVID-19, the high number of overlying acute bronchopneumonia, and high-level pulmonary virus detection limited to patients who died ≤2 weeks after onset of symptoms, correlating with exudative phase of DAD.