Some North Carolinians have endured COVID and its long-haul aftermath for two harrowing years. A clinic at UNC keeps up with cutting-edge research and tailored therapies in hopes of finding solutions.
Tony Marks in Pinehurst and Brooke Keaton in Charlotte both lived orderly, productive lives two years ago. That was clearly reflected in their steady jobs and close family ties.
However, their experiences with the long-term effects of infection with the COVID-19 virus have touched and in many cases devastated nearly every other aspect of each of their days.
Marks and Keaton don’t know each other, but both have worked with John M. Baratta, who practices physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of North Carolina COVID Recovery Clinic. There, Baratta and his colleagues attempt to explore several paths out of these lingering, disabling after-effects of the pandemic.
“I haven’t had a day in over a year and a half that I have not hurt, that I have not been tired, that my hands just don’t feel like they have arthritis,” Marks, 55, a software executive, said during a physical therapy session at the clinic. “I just can’t explain how bad I just physically hurt, on a day-to-day basis, and there’s the fatigue, and so I know there’s gotta be something else, right? And that’s why I want to do this so badly.”
As Marks battles the lingering effects of COVID, he faces unpredictable limits on his working days. Keaton struggles with her symptoms so much that she has lost her job as a preschool teacher.
However, in the larger picture emerging from the UNC clinic and others, there are signs that help may be on the way for the patients known as COVID “long haulers” — aid in the form of new research, promising treatments, and evolving approaches to therapy.
New research holds hope
Approaches monitored at the UNC clinic include new hard science about microclots that may lie at the heart of some of long COVID’s symptoms, a potentially game-changing analysis introduced by South African researcher, Resia Pretorius.
“Her lab has demonstrated that there are circulating microclots in the blood of many people with long COVID,” Baratta explained during an interview at the Chapel Hill-based clinic. “These clots don’t necessarily block blood vessels causing stroke or heart attack. What these microclots do is trap inflammatory molecules and they prevent the breakdown of some of the inflammation.
“So these circulating microclots can cause this persistent inflammatory process. And they’ve actually, in some early clinical research, been trying to anticoagulate patients in an attempt to break down the microclots and some of their early data suggests favorable results.”
The theory of microclots’ role in the disease has created excitement as an example of a new direction, even though Pretorius’s findings were based on a relatively small sample of patients and separate research found lower levels of microclotting in the vessels of other long COVID patients.
It’s too early to know whether Pretorius’s findings will be replicated on a large scale, Baratta said, but her findings show the kind of progress that will be necessary to advance the treatment of long COVID.
Known internationally before her research on long COVID, Pretorius gave the keynote speech at a symposium on approaches to long COVID presented by UNC in Greensboro in May.
This artical was originally published by North Carolina Health News,
