More Than Respiratory: Looking at How COVID-19 Affects Other Systems
One cardiologist speaks about what she witnessed in her NYC hospital including how the virus can be multi-organ and the development of COVID-19 diagnostic protocols.
In the spring of 2020, New York City quickly escalated into the US epicenter for the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Within weeks, the incidence and mortality rates were higher than anywhere in the country.
Aakriti Gupta, MD, is a cardiologist at New York’s Columbia University Irving Medical Center and witnessed it firsthand.
Working there this past spring, she saw a host of health issues in severely sick COVID-19 patients that affected more than their respiratory systems.
“People who get hospitalized have a spectrum of manifestations that they can present with beside the lung involvement…they can present with multiple organ involvement.”
In these hospitalized patients, Gupta saw health issues arise in the neurological, cardiovascular, and renal systems. In fact, she found 50% of patients had issues with their kidneys.
Seeing severe multi-organ system issues, Gupta and colleagues decided to write a paper outlining their experiences. It recently appeared in the publication Nature Medicine.
In the first segment of an interview with Contagion®, she discusses her findings in each of these systems, and how they developed a diagnostic testing protocol called “COVID labs” for patients.
