A patient suffering from long-term COVID is examined by medical staff at the post-coronavirus disease (COVID-19) clinic at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel, on February 21, 2022.— Reuters/File
A shocking research piece in the BMJ revealed that long-term COVID patients are seeking “blood washing treatment” in private clinics in Cyprus, Germany and Switzerland, but medical experts are concerned about patient safety.
To carry out the treatment, known as apheresis, large needles are inserted into the veins and the blood is ‘filtered’ by removing inflammatory lipids and proteins. The German Society of Nephrology recommends apheresis as a last resort for lipid disorders.
“I am concerned that these patients have received therapies that have not been evaluated using modern scientific methods – well-designed clinical trials,” said Beverley Hunt, medical director of the charity Thrombosis UK as quoted in the BMJ.
“In this situation, the treatment may or may not benefit them but, worryingly, it also carries the risk of harm.”
Gitte Boumeester caught SARS-CoV-2 in November 2020. Desperate for a cure, she spent almost half of her savings to try blood washing treatment with the Long COVID Center in Lamarca, but found no improvement in your health
“I think they should put more emphasis on the experimental nature of the treatments, especially since it’s very expensive,” Boumeester said. “Before I started I realized that the result was uncertain, but everyone at the clinic is so positive that you start to believe it too and get your hopes up.”
Beate Jaeger, who runs the North Rhine Lipid Center, and Markus Klotz, who founded the Long COVID Center in Cyprus, believe that microclots are linked to long symptoms of COVID.
They cite research by Etheresia Pretorius, professor of physiological sciences at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, to justify their blood washing treatment and anticoagulant therapy.
However, some medical experts say more research is needed to show that microclots are linked to COVID long before treatment is available.
“They [microclots] may be a biomarker of disease, but how do we know they are causal?” said Robert Ariens, professor of vascular biology at the University of Leeds School of Medicine.
“If we don’t know the mechanisms by which microclots are formed and whether or not they are the cause of the disease, it seems premature to design a treatment to eliminate microclots, since both apheresis and triple anticoagulation are not without risks. the bloody obvious,” he continued.
However, there is no published peer-reviewed evidence showing that apheresis and anticoagulant therapy reduce microlots.
He added: “Because we don’t know how they form, we can’t say whether this treatment will prevent microclots from recurring.”