CHICAGO – Researchers say a new study has confirmed, for the first time, that COVID-19 can cause the body to attack itself. Deep medical imaging reveals that some symptoms of pain and joint pain can be prolonged and require lifelong management.
Aside from losing her sense of smell last June, Tajma Hodzick had none of the telltale signs of a COVID infection.
“I did not even lose my taste. Most of it was just smell, ”he recalled.
But within days of giving a positive, the 31-year-old woman began to have more serious side effects. Blisters appeared on his hands, rashes on his legs and arms, and his joints began to swell.
“I also started to have some pain in my feet. I ended up in the emergency room just because the swelling was too big on my hands. I had blisters, “Hodzick said.” I couldn’t wash my hands, because I couldn’t rub them; it hurt so much. “
A new article published in the journal Skeletal Radiology confirmed and documented the causes of such symptoms by computed tomography, MRI, and ultrasound.
“In some patients, COVID-19 causes an autoimmune reaction, which means the virus can trick the body into attacking itself,” Dr. Swati Deshmukh, musculoskeletal radiologist and assistant professor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
She is one of the authors of the study.
“Some of my patients have recovered and the images have shown signs of improvement, but for other patients, and especially for patients with these autoimmune conditions that have been triggered by COVID-19, they will need lifelong treatment. said Deshmukh.
In some cases, Dr. Deshmukh says that such inflammatory responses can mysteriously appear without other common symptoms of coronavirus.
“They may not even know they have become infected with the virus and later continue to develop problems with muscles, with nerves with joints,” he said.
The image, she says, can help explain the origins of symptoms and guide post-COVID-19 treatments by a rheumatologist or dermatologist.
After two hospitalizations and three biopsies, Hodzick was finally diagnosed with COVID-induced psoriatic arthritis. It could be one of the first of its kind.
Chronic condition now requires you to take medication daily.
“We really don’t know if once I get out of my system, how will it be,” he said. “If I, at some point, start weaning off the medication or if these symptoms will reappear. So really right now, it’s a pretty big mystery.”
It is another long-term symptom that experts say shows what remains to be learned about the persistent effects of the virus.