Difficulties in diagnosing complications of COVID-19: description of a clinical case

Abstract

It is well known that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and characterized by an acute respiratory syndrome with a high morbidity and mortality had rapidly spread around the world, taking on the character of a pandemic. The virus affects not only the respiratory tract, but also other organs due to mechanisms of the cytokine storm mechanism, in addition, hypoxic damage, immune mechanism and the mechanism involving angiotensin-converting enzyme. The frequency of CVT associated with COVID-19 is less than 0.02%, on the one hand, is low, but on the other hand, this rate is 30–60 times higher than the frequency of CVT in persons without COVID-19 (0.0003–0.0004% in adults and 0.0007% in children). For an individual patient, it is extremely important that the combination of CVT and COVID-19 is associated with a higher mortality rate (45.5%) in contrast to CVT (15%) and COVID-19 (5.6%) separately. In the presented literature review, the authors focus on the pathophysiological mechanisms of the development of COVID-19 associated cerebral thrombosis for a deeper and more holistic view of the pathological process occurring in the body in order to form and improve the clinical thinking of specialist doctors, and cite their own clinical observation as an illustration of the difficulties of diagnosing COVID-19 associated cerebral thrombosis. The authors believe that this review of the literature describing a clinical case is valuable from the point of view of practical applicability, both for clinicians of various fields and for researchers.