As the USA confronts both COVID-19 and issues regarding race, I think it is important to highlight one big way that these issues intersect: disparities in health outcomes during this pandemic. There are many social barriers, as well as lack of scientific knowledge, that have led to African Americans having generally worse health outcomes (Mays, Cochran, Barnes, 2007). This week’s article reveals that, unfortunately, a similar trend is observed during the COVID-19 crisis. Writing in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, Dmytriw et al. report on 69 cases of ischemic stroke …
COVID-19 Autopsies Reveal Multiorgan Tropism, Including Brain
Since starting this blog, a lot of the literature I’ve written about has been circling around the idea that SARS-CoV-2 may infect the brain. We’ve seen neurological symptoms in patients and in vitro assays showing viral invasion of human iPSC-derived neurons, but this week I found a paper published back in May that revealed SARS-CoV-2 does indeed infect the brains of COVID-19 patients. It would have been nice to stumble upon this finding when it first surfaced three months ago, but better late than never! Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine from the University Medical Center …
Intensive Care Unit Delirium in COVID-19 Case Report
It’s been a long week of processing COVID-19 patient blood. After handling vial after vial of blood in a very controlled laboratory environment, it’s easy to forget the unpredictable nature of this virus’s presentation in clinical settings, so I’m excited to be able to sit down at the end of the week and learn more about what clinicians are dealing with. This week brings a new case report coming out of Stanford published in Psychosomatics, describing hyperactive intensive care unit (ICU) delirium in a 70-year-old woman with COVID-19 (Sher et al., 2020). The patient presented to the clinic …