Rheumatological complications of Covid 19, 2021, Zacharius et al

Andy

Retired committee member
Abstract

Introduction
COVID-19 has caused unprecedented hardships in the 21st century with more than 150 million infections. Various immunological phenomena have been described during the course of the infection, and this infection has also triggered autoimmunity. Rheumatological illnesses have been described following resolution of the acute infection; hence we sought to conduct a review of the rheumatological complications of COVID-19.

Methods
We conducted a literature search for articles relating to sequelae of COVID-19 from Jan 2020 to 30th April 2021.

Results
We found a number of reports of inflammatory arthritis after SARS-CoV-2 infection. SLE and renal disease have been described, and vasculitis also appears to be a common complication. Rhabdomyolysis and myositis has also been reported in a number of patients. We also found some evidence of large vessel vasculitis in ‘long COVID’ patients.

Conclusions
This review highlights a number of important complications such as inflammatory arthritis, lupus-like disease, myostis and vasculitis following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Open access, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568997221001567
 
Re large vessel vasculitis and Long Covid:
However, LVV could be a complication of COVID-19 – an Italian study on patients with persistent symptoms after recovery from COVID-19 (so called long COVID) demonstrated 6/10 patients with large vessel vasculitis seen on PET CT imaging [118]. The smooth linear pattern seen in the aorta of these patients could not be differentiated from the similar patterns in patients with large vessel vasculitis. The ascending aorta, arch of aorta, descending aorta and ilio-femorals were the common arteries showing increased uptake in these patients.

The reference for this is
M. Sollini, M. Ciccarelli, M. Cecconi, et al.
Vasculitis changes in COVID-19 survivors with persistent symptoms: an [18F]FDG-PET/CT study
Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging (2020), 10.1007/s00259-020-05084-3
Google Scholar
 
Back
Top Bottom