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

I'm listening again to the segment of the BBC Inside Science program.
It's from about 15 minutes to 21 minutes.

The first part was by BBC reporter Emily Bird summarising what has been found about microclots.

The microclots are found in any type of disease where there is inflammation, so in diabetes, psoriasis, cardiovascular disease and neuroinflammatory diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

They looked for them in ME/CFS after finding them in Long Covid, caused, they say, by the spike protein in Long Covid. They found ten times the concentration of microclots in ME/CFS patients compared to controls. The explanation given was that they may be a result of something else in the blood in ME/CFS related perhaps to a dormant infection.

Then a section by Dr Pretorius where she says she doesn't know why there are microclots, but it seems likely that whatever pathology is causing ME/CFS is also causing the microclots, so they are a result, not a cause of ME/CFS. So the microclots are not the cause of ME/CFS but can lead to problems, so may be a perpetuating factor of symptoms.

The reporter had also interviewed Prof Kell, who she said seemed more hopeful that the clots could actually be causing ME/CFS by blocking the smallest blood vessels so leading to tissues in local areas being starved of oxygen which could cause the wide variety of symptoms in ME/CFS and LC.

Dr Kell described the microclots under and electron microscope as like disorganised sphaghetti.

A clip of Dr Kell where he says it can explain things like fatigue and the enormous number of symptoms in ME/CFS and LC. He says it's all about oxygen not getting to tissues, so in the brain, you get brain fog, and muscles don't work properly leading to fatigue, and kidneys not working properly.

Back to the reporter - the question of whether microclots could be a target for treatment. The answer is still a way to go, but some hope from treatments that either prevent the clots forming or gets rid of them.

Pretorius speaks again: see the transcript in RedFox's post #196 above.
She finishes by saying she hopes the finding in LC will lead to more research as well in other post viral conditions and also in Alzheimers' and Parkinsons' diseases.

Note that Pretorius and Kell were 2 of the speakers and Dr Karl Morten's conference this week. See this thread.
 
Trish said:
Then a section by Dr Pretorius where she says she doesn't know why there are microclots, but it seems likely that whatever pathology is causing ME/CFS is also causing the microclots, so they are a result, not a cause of ME/CFS. So the microclots are not the cause of ME/CFS but can lead to problems, so may be a perpetuating factor of symptoms.
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I'm glad she's being upfront about this. In the past, she's made statements that clots might be the cause, and so did many of her followers. Her current position is better justified by the data. While less impressive, these results are still beneficial because they show it's not in our heads.
 
Professor Kell when asked what the micro clots look like under a microscope, "the elements of the blood clots are fibers which look in a electro microscope look like a plate of spaghetti, except that in the presence of some of these other things such as of bacteria cell walls component, the clotting goes to a completely different type of structure . . " and then goes to describe the structure of parboiled spaghett when not cooked properly sticks together and makes a holy mess.
 
https://www.rcsi.com/dublin/news-an...ood-clotting-imbalance-persists-in-long-covid

The team of researchers, led by Professor James O'Donnell at the RCSI School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences with Dr Helen Fogarty as Clinical Fellow, analysed blood from 50 patients with Long COVID syndrome up to 12 weeks post infection with the COVID-19 virus. They compared the samples to 'controls', blood from healthy people who did not have Long COVID syndrome.

The study found that the blood of patients with Long COVID syndrome had higher levels of a blood-clotting booster called von Willebrand Factor (VWF), and lower levels of a protein that normally breaks down VWF, called ADAMTS13. Their analysis also suggests that blood vessels were still being damaged long after the initial infection, and that specific cells of the immune system were at abnormal levels in patients with Long COVID.
 
Braganca said:
https://www.rcsi.com/dublin/news-an...ood-clotting-imbalance-persists-in-long-covid

The team of researchers, led by Professor James O'Donnell at the RCSI School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences with Dr Helen Fogarty as Clinical Fellow, analysed blood from 50 patients with Long COVID syndrome up to 12 weeks post infection with the COVID-19 virus. They compared the samples to 'controls', blood from healthy people who did not have Long COVID syndrome.

The study found that the blood of patients with Long COVID syndrome had higher levels of a blood-clotting booster called von Willebrand Factor (VWF), and lower levels of a protein that normally breaks down VWF, called ADAMTS13. Their analysis also suggests that blood vessels were still being damaged long after the initial infection, and that specific cells of the immune system were at abnormal levels in patients with Long COVID.
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Study originally mentioned on this thread
https://www.s4me.info/threads/susta...-immune-dysfunction-2022-fogarty-et-al.28761/
 
Braganca said:
https://www.rcsi.com/dublin/news-an...ood-clotting-imbalance-persists-in-long-covid

The team of researchers, led by Professor James O'Donnell at the RCSI School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences with Dr Helen Fogarty as Clinical Fellow, analysed blood from 50 patients with Long COVID syndrome up to 12 weeks post infection with the COVID-19 virus. They compared the samples to 'controls', blood from healthy people who did not have Long COVID syndrome.

The study found that the blood of patients with Long COVID syndrome had higher levels of a blood-clotting booster called von Willebrand Factor (VWF), and lower levels of a protein that normally breaks down VWF, called ADAMTS13. Their analysis also suggests that blood vessels were still being damaged long after the initial infection, and that specific cells of the immune system were at abnormal levels in patients with Long COVID.
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Is this one a good study?
 
Sarah94 said:
Is this one a good study?
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Had to say without looking at the paywalled paper in detail. The measurements are probably valid but their significance is unclear. Within 12 weeks of Covid it may not be that surprising that clotting factors are shifted - that need not mean that any further clotting is occurring. The T cell differences are very non-specific and unlikely to mean much in relation to clotting.
 
Article in Nature
Could tiny blood clots cause long COVID’s puzzling symptoms?
.......
Proponents of the idea (#teamclots, as they sometimes refer to themselves on Twitter) include Etheresia Pretorius, a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and Douglas Kell, a systems biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who led the first team to visualize micro-clots in the blood of people with long COVID. They say that the evidence implicating micro-clots is undeniable, and they want trials of the kinds of anticoagulant treatment that Hawthorne is considering. Pretorius penned the Guardian article that caught Hawthorne’s attention.

But many haematologists and COVID-19 researchers worry that enthusiasm for the clot hypothesis has outpaced the data. They want to see larger studies and stronger causal evidence. And they are concerned about people seeking out unproven, potentially risky treatments.

When it comes to long COVID, “we’ve now got little scattered of bits of evidence”, says Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London. “We’re all scuttling to try and put it together in some kind of consensus. We’re so far away from that. It’s very unsatisfying.”
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So far, Pretorius, Kell and their colleagues are the only group that has published results on micro-clots in people with long COVID.

But in unpublished work, Caroline Dalton, a neuroscientist at Sheffield Hallam University’s Biomolecular Sciences Research Centre, UK, has replicated the results. She and her colleagues used a slightly different method, involving an automated microscopy imaging scanner, to count the number of clots in blood. The team compared 3 groups of about 25 individuals: people who had never knowingly had COVID-19, those who had had COVID-19 and recovered, and people with long COVID. All three groups had micro-clots, but those who had never had COVID-19 tended to have fewer, smaller clots, and people with long COVID had a greater number of larger clots. The previously infected group fell in the middle. The team’s hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 infection creates a burst of micro-clots that go away over time. In individuals with long COVID, however, they seem to persist.
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In many ways, long COVID resembles another disease that has defied explanation: chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). Maureen Hanson, who directs the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) ME/CFS Collaborative Research Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says that Pretorius and Kell’s research has renewed interest in a 1980s-era hypothesis about abnormal clots contributing to symptoms. Pretorius, Kell and colleagues found amyloid clots in the blood of people with ME/CFS, but the amount was much lower than what they’ve found in people with long COVID5. So clotting is probably only a partial explanation for ME/CFS, Pretorius says.
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full article
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7
 
I'm a bit baffled why there hasn't been a push elsewhere (particularly USA) to run GWAS studies on long covid, and indeed ME/CFS. Just strikes me that latching onto this or that theory --- it's the micro-clots or whatever --- leads to research which may have nothing to do with the disease i.e. long covid (or indeed ME/CFS).
 
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Shouldn't he be asking or advising not take these supplements unless they've had blood work done to determine if they actually need this instead of providing info to 'teamclots"?

Have LC pts been tested first to see if they actually need this?

They are not innocent supplements. I had quite a scare taking them 20 years ago.
 
Does anyone else just eat natto anyway? I've been eating some usually once a week or so for quite some years. I'm sure that's not the dosage in whatever these supplements are, but... why don't they study effects of natto eating for comparison? Sign me up!

I love natto but these supplements and potions? Hm.
 
Well.....my response was 'WTF is natto' - I'm 56 (I think) and I've never heard of it.

I did gather that at least one person considers it might be a type of food ;)

It turns out that the reason I've never heard of it, when I have heard of many, many, types of food, is because I'm from the NE of England, which suggests that I'm probably not Japanese, where natto seems to be from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nattō
 
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