The micro-clot finding in Long Covid — implications for the possible aetiology of ME/CFS

Going off topic a little.

Snow Leopard said:
This is something I mentioned to Bupesh Prusty when he was making claims about blood cell deformability. Individuals who are less active tend to have slower turnover of RBCs, so an explicit measure of RBC age needs to be measured to prevent confounding.
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How the blood is stored can also present different outcomes.

Most researchers observed a significant deterioration in cell deformability after 2 to 3 weeks of storage (see Table 1). At the same time, for several units, the stability of deformability was observed throughout storage (Barshtein et al., 2020b; Islamzada et al., 2020). There was also significant variability in the deformability of the red cells, both between different donors and between PRBC units. In addition, it was found that the preparation of the PRBC unit causes an alteration in the deformability of cells (Barshtein et al., 2020a).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.722896/full
 
Mij said:
"full container of clots"? Wouldn't that have killed someone if they had that many clots?

Are they really clots or something else?
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It doesn't make a lot of sense and I think it is a pity this sort of stuff is going around social media.
Fibrinogen is the normal soluble protein that we all need to be healthy. Clots are the fibrin cleavage product. An apheresis machine designed to remove clots might well give you a pot of fibrin but goodness knows whether there was anything wrong beforehand. The clots are supposed to be microscopic anyway.
 
A short piece with Kell and Pretorius snips, also someone introducing them who might have been Amy Proal or maybe not. Nothing very new or detailed. Pretorius said she did not think microclots caused symptoms. I think Kell said he thought they did. If they have found them in diabetes and rheumatoid the story is a bit confusing if so.
 
I think Pretorius said the microclots are a downstream effect of whatever is in the blood causing the disease, so in Long Covid it's the spike protein, in ME/CFS and other diseases the microclots are found in, it will be something else.

They explained that the microclots are different from the sort of clots that cuase DVT etc, they are much smaller, and can reduce blood flow in tissues in the organs affected. Kell suggested this could explain the symptoms of ME/CFS like brain fog and muscle fatigue.

Even if this doesn't turn out to be the main cause of symptoms, it was very nice to hear Pretorius saying how badly pwME have been treated and that it's not psychosomatic.
 
Transcription of Resia Pretorius's soundbite that Adam posted, for those of you who find reading easier:
(She's talking about ME/CFS)
Resia Pretorius said:
It has been a significantly neglected disease because so many clinicians and researchers have driven the idea that it is a psychological disease. And many of the patients have been suffering really--to the extreme levels where they cannot lift their head from their bed. They lie in dark rooms without any help. That's the saddest part. And I hope that this renewed interest in post-viral conditions would give these patients some sort of hope that it is not all in their head. It is actually a physical disease with a physical reason. And trying to get them out of bed and do exercise and think themselves better is definitely not going to work.
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