Experts Find Out Why Coronavirus Is One Of …

A group of experts from the Salk Institute, in the USA, assured that the coronavirus is a vascular disease and not a respiratory disease, as it was believed until now. According to the study published in Circulation Research, the virus’s spike proteins, which are those that help infect a person by adhering to healthy cells, “damage and attack the vascular system at the cellular level.” This, they noted, would explain the wide variety of “unrelated complications” caused by SARS-CoV-2.

In an attempt to understand the mechanism used by the coronavirus, the researchers first created a pseudovirus surrounded by a classic crown of spike proteins, but which did not contain any real viruses.

The exposure, experts detailed, caused damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model, allowing them to verify that the spike protein alone was enough to cause the disease. Tissue samples, meanwhile, showed inflammation of the endothelial cells that line the walls of the pulmonary artery.

The team then reproduced this process in the laboratory, exposing healthy endothelial cells, which are the ones lining the arteries, to the spike protein.

In this way, they verified that this cells damaged by proteins by binding to the receptor ACE2, What is it the one that allows the virus to enter the cell. According to experts, this union is what directly damages and fragments mitochondria – the organelles that generate energy for cells.

“A lot of people think it’s respiratory disease, but it’s actually vascular disease. This could explain why some people have strokes and why others have problems in other parts of the body.. What they have in common is that all of these complications have a vascular basis, ”explained Uri Manor, co-lead author of the study.

If “the replication capacities of the virus are eliminated”, specifies the specialist in this regard, “it continues to have a significant damaging effect on vascular cellssimply because of its ability to bind to this S protein, the ACE2 receptor, now famous thanks to COVID-19. “

“It has been known for a year that the greatest risk of covid is the inflammatory picture presented by patients.. Usually in mild cases the infection is limited only to the upper respiratory tract, ”said Rafael Máñez Mendiluce, head of intensive care at Bellvitge University Hospital in Spain.

Therefore, he stressed, it is worth asking whether the vascular problems are related to the inflammatory response of the patient’s immune system, as is the case with other diseases. “Treatments with antithrombotic drugs have not been shown to be particularly effective, so it is recommended to focus on the inflammation caused by the immune response. We continue to have no treatment for thrombosis caused by the inflammatory response generated by infection, ”he said. .