Thread by @loscharlos

🚨#MicroClots research in #LongCovid has now been replicated in UK. Similar findings also in Germany & Ireland:

"Caroline Dalton, a neuroscientist at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, has replicated the results.. In Long COVID #MicroClots seem to persist."
nature.com/articles/d4158…

"Dalton has also found that fatigue scores seem to correlate with #MicroClot counts..That, says Dalton, 'increases confidence that we are measuring something that is mechanistically linked to the condition'. #LongCovid

"Danny Jonigk, a pathologist at Hanover Medical School in Germany looked at tissue samples from people who died of COVID. They found #MicroClots & saw that the capillaries had split, forming new branches to try to keep oxygen-rich blood flowing." #LongCovid

"James O’Donnell, a haematologist and clotting specialist at Trinity College Dublin, and his colleagues found that about 25% of people who are recovering from COVID-19 have signs of increased clotting that are 'quite marked and unusual', he says."#LongCovid

"#TeamClots include @resiapretorius & @dbkell, who led the first team to visualize #MicroClots in the blood of #LongCovid patients. They say the evidence implicating micro-clots is undeniable, & want trials of the kinds of anticoagulant treatment that Hawthorne is considering."

"In another study, #TeamClots looked at the blood of 80 people with #LongCovid and found #MicroClots in all of the samples."

"Research by Kell, Pretorius and their colleagues suggests that the fibrin has misfolded, creating a gluey, ‘amyloid’ version of itself. It doesn’t take much misfolding to seed disaster, says Kell. 'If the first one changes its conformation, all the others have to follow suit',"

"Pretorius & Kell think the spike protein, which SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter cells, might be the trigger in #LongCovid. When they added the spike protein to plasma from healthy volunteers in the laboratory, that alone was enough to prompt formation of these abnormal clots"

"Another paper from a Swedish group showed that certain peptides in the spike can form amyloid strands on their own, at least in a test tube. It’s possible that these misfolded strands provide a kind of template, says Sofie Nyström, a protein chemist at Linköping University"

"A California-based group found that fibrin can actually bind to the spike. In a 2021 preprint, it reported that when the two proteins bind, fibrin ramps up inflammation & forms clots that are harder to degrade." #LongCovid

Wow I'm speechless when I hear folks of #MedTwitter pipe up to say “I’d like to see confirmation from other investigators.” -- but crickets when @NIH denied the ONLY attempt (@PutrinoLab) in the US to do so. Is their magic fairy who does this "replication", or is not their job?