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Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a multisystemic vascular disease. Up to 60% of the patients suffer from long-term sequelae and persistent symptoms even 6 months after the initial infection. METHODS: This prospective, observational study included 58...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer Netherlands
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9366128/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35951203 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10456-022-09850-9 |
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author | Osiaevi, Irina Schulze, Arik Evers, Georg Harmening, Kimon Vink, Hans Kümpers, Philipp Mohr, Michael Rovas, Alexandros |
author_facet | Osiaevi, Irina Schulze, Arik Evers, Georg Harmening, Kimon Vink, Hans Kümpers, Philipp Mohr, Michael Rovas, Alexandros |
author_sort | Osiaevi, Irina |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Recent studies have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a multisystemic vascular disease. Up to 60% of the patients suffer from long-term sequelae and persistent symptoms even 6 months after the initial infection. METHODS: This prospective, observational study included 58 participants, 27 of whom were long COVID patients with persistent symptoms > 12 weeks after recovery from PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fifteen healthy volunteers and a historical cohort of critically ill COVID-19 patients (n = 16) served as controls. All participants underwent sublingual videomicroscopy using sidestream dark field imaging. A newly developed version of Glycocheck™ software was used to quantify vascular density, perfused boundary region (PBR-an inverse variable of endothelial glycocalyx dimensions), red blood cell velocity (VRBC) and the microvascular health score (MVHS™) in sublingual microvessels with diameters 4–25 µm. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Although dimensions of the glycocalyx were comparable to those of healthy controls, a µm-precise analysis showed a significant decrease of vascular density, that exclusively affected very small capillaries (D5: − 45.16%; D6: − 35.60%; D7: − 22.79%). Plotting VRBC of capillaries and feed vessels showed that the number of capillaries perfused in long COVID patients was comparable to that of critically ill COVID-19 patients and did not respond adequately to local variations of tissue metabolic demand. MVHS was markedly reduced in the long COVID cohort (healthy 3.87 vs. long COVID 2.72 points; p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: Our current data strongly suggest that COVID-19 leaves a persistent capillary rarefication even 18 months after infection. Whether, to what extent, and when the observed damage might be reversible remains unclear. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10456-022-09850-9. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9366128 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93661282022-08-11 Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome Osiaevi, Irina Schulze, Arik Evers, Georg Harmening, Kimon Vink, Hans Kümpers, Philipp Mohr, Michael Rovas, Alexandros Angiogenesis Original Paper BACKGROUND: Recent studies have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a multisystemic vascular disease. Up to 60% of the patients suffer from long-term sequelae and persistent symptoms even 6 months after the initial infection. METHODS: This prospective, observational study included 58 participants, 27 of whom were long COVID patients with persistent symptoms > 12 weeks after recovery from PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fifteen healthy volunteers and a historical cohort of critically ill COVID-19 patients (n = 16) served as controls. All participants underwent sublingual videomicroscopy using sidestream dark field imaging. A newly developed version of Glycocheck™ software was used to quantify vascular density, perfused boundary region (PBR-an inverse variable of endothelial glycocalyx dimensions), red blood cell velocity (VRBC) and the microvascular health score (MVHS™) in sublingual microvessels with diameters 4–25 µm. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Although dimensions of the glycocalyx were comparable to those of healthy controls, a µm-precise analysis showed a significant decrease of vascular density, that exclusively affected very small capillaries (D5: − 45.16%; D6: − 35.60%; D7: − 22.79%). Plotting VRBC of capillaries and feed vessels showed that the number of capillaries perfused in long COVID patients was comparable to that of critically ill COVID-19 patients and did not respond adequately to local variations of tissue metabolic demand. MVHS was markedly reduced in the long COVID cohort (healthy 3.87 vs. long COVID 2.72 points; p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS: Our current data strongly suggest that COVID-19 leaves a persistent capillary rarefication even 18 months after infection. Whether, to what extent, and when the observed damage might be reversible remains unclear. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10456-022-09850-9. Springer Netherlands 2022-08-11 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9366128/ /pubmed/35951203 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10456-022-09850-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Osiaevi, Irina Schulze, Arik Evers, Georg Harmening, Kimon Vink, Hans Kümpers, Philipp Mohr, Michael Rovas, Alexandros Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title | Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title_full | Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title_fullStr | Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title_full_unstemmed | Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title_short | Persistent capillary rarefication in long COVID syndrome |
title_sort | persistent capillary rarefication in long covid syndrome |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9366128/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35951203 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10456-022-09850-9 |
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