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COVID-19 pathogenesis and host immune response
Published in Sanjeeva Srivastava, Multi-Pronged Omics Technologies to Understand COVID-19, 2022
Surbhi Bihani, Shalini Aggarwal, Arup Acharjee
Interleukin 6 (IL-6), which has been widely associated with the severity of COVID-19 (J. Zhang et al. 2020), is a pleiotropic cytokine with the ability to induce the production of acute-phase proteins (APP) by liver cells and promote antibody production, T-cell differentiation, and megakaryocyte maturation (Tanaka, Narazaki, and Kishimoto 2014). Furthermore, IL-6 inhibits the production of albumin (responsible for maintaining oncotic pressure of the blood) and induces the production of hepcidin (reduces iron levels in serum by blocking iron transporter—ferroportin— in enterocytes and macrophages) and ferritin (iron-storing blood protein) (Tanaka, Narazaki, and Kishimoto 2014; Edeas, Saleh, and Peyssonnaux 2020). Many of these biological effects of IL-6 corroborate very well with the clinical features of COVID-19. Proteome analysis of sera from severe patients has revealed significant upregulation of APPs like serum amyloid A (SAA), C-reactive protein (CRP), alpha-1-antichymotrypsin, and fibrinogen (D’Alessandro et al. 2020; Shen et al. 2020), suggestive of a hyper-inflammatory state associated with the disease. Coagulation-related abnormalities are a significant risk factor in susceptible patients and can be partly attributed to increased platelet production due to IL-6-induced megakaryocyte maturation (Roncati, Manenti et al. 2020; Biswas and Khan 2020; Al-Samkari et al. 2020; Wool and Miller 2021; Roncati, Ligabue et al. 2020). Markedly decreased serum levels of albumin and iron, also called hypoalbuminemia and hypoferremia, respectively, and high serum levels of hepcidin and ferritin have been associated with disease severity, poor clinical outcomes, and mortality (J. Huang et al. n.d.; Yafei Zhang et al. 2020; Zhao et al. 2020; J. Xia et al. 2019; Nai et al. 2021; Cheng et al. 2020). Excess intracellular iron resulting from high hepcidin levels react with intracellular oxygen, leading to reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. This may lead to oxidative stress and cellular damage in multiple organs. Interestingly, altered iron homeostasis has been implicated in oxidative cell death called ferroptosis (Ursini and Maiorino 2020), which is crucially involved in neurological disturbances (J.-X. Ren et al. 2020), anosmia (loss of smell) (Dinc et al. 2016), and ageusia (loss of taste) (Osaki et al. 1996), features very commonly manifested in COVID-19.
Return to school in the COVID-19 era: considerations for temperature measurement
Published in Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology, 2020
Alex Buoite Stella, Paolo Manganotti, Giovanni Furlanis, Agostino Accardo, Miloš Ajčević
The infection from the novel SARS-CoV-2 rapidly developed in a global pandemic which resulted in an impressive reorganisation of all social activities, including teaching at all levels, from schools to universities [1,2]. After an initial phase of the pandemic characterised by a lockdown period in many countries [3], a gradual return to normal activities has been regulated by several instructions intended to rapidly recognise potentially infected people and reduce the spread of the virus [4]. Multiorgan symptoms have been associated to COVID-19, mostly fever, cough, myalgia, fatigue [5] and some neurological features such ageusia and anosmia [6,7]. Based on these symptoms, the most common preventive procedure consists in measuring body temperature before entering shops, public offices, or workplaces, including hospitals [8,9]. Currently many countries are discussing and developing the regulations for a safe “return to school”, which is expected in the next months. Among the decisions the governments and administrative bodies are considering, measurement of body temperature is one of the strategies suggested to prevent the spread of the virus among students and teachers. This paper aims to discuss some of the limitations some procedures and devices may have in effectively recognise fever symptoms, and how this may apply in teaching contexts such as schools and universities both for students and staff.
Ex vivo treatment with fucoidan of mononuclear cells from SARS-CoV-2 infected patients
Published in International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 2022
K. J. G. Díaz-Resendiz, G. A. Toledo-Ibarra, R. Ruiz-Manzano, D.A. Giron Perez, C.E. Covantes-Rosales, A. B. Benitez-Trinidad, K. M Ramirez-Ibarra, A. T. Hermosillo Escobedo, I. González-Navarro, G.H. Ventura-Ramón, A. Romero Castro, D. Alam Escamilla, A. Y. Bueno-Duran, Manuel Iván Girón-Pérez
Clinical management of COVID-19 is a current issue due to the lack of a highly effective treatment against the disease. Many efforts have been made to avoid mortality and sequelae caused by this disease. Thus, this study aimed to perform an ex vivo evaluation of fucoidan, additionally, the signs and symptoms reported by the infected patients were analyzed. As expected, some SARS‐CoV‐2 infected patients were asymptomatic (25%), whilst in others, the infection caused mild to moderate COVID‐19 as it is previously reported (Kaye et al. 2020). In our study, the most prevalent symptoms were anosmia, dysgeusia, headache, cough, fever, and myalgia. In this sense, a case-control study considered anosmia and ageusia as early indicators of COVID-19 in addition to the well-established symptoms, such as fever, cough, and dyspnea (La Torre et al. 2020). A systematic review and meta-analysis study in COVID-19 patients informed that the prevalence of olfactory dysfunction and taste dysfunction were 43.0% and 44.6%, respectively (von Bartheld et al. 2020), both percentages are in concordance with obtained data in this research. On the other hand, a report indicated that at least half of patients with COVID‐19 had cough, sore throat, fever, muscle pain, joint pain, fatigue, or headache as main symptoms (Struyf et al. 2020). The cause of the elevated prevalence of chemosensory dysfunction in Nayarit´s patients is unclear, but might be associated with age, gender, disease severity, and ethnicity, being this last one highly significant in Caucasian population (54.8%) vs. Asians (17.7%); it could be attributed to genetic susceptibility and the presence of different SARS-CoV-2 variants in different geographic locations, but these two causes are not mutually exclusive (von Bartheld et al. 2020).
Design of an effective piezoelectric microcantilever biosensor for rapid detection of COVID-19
Published in Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology, 2021
Hannaneh Kabir, Mohsen Merati, Mohammad J. Abdekhodaie
Acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a progressive pandemic of coronaviruses in 2019 which is called COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019). As the World Health Organisation (WHO) stated, COVID-19 is a Health Emergency and International Concern from February 2020 which first appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019. There are seven kinds of coronaviruses which have different severity of symptoms. Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome – Corona Virus (MERS-CoV), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome -Corona Virus (SARS-CoV-1), and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) have had high pathogenicity among the others. Similar to MERS and SARS-CoV-1, COVID-19 has developed unprecedented pandemics in societies [1]. Regarding the updated statistics, it was confirmed that more than hundreds of million cases have been infected which results in more than two million deaths over the world, so far. Scientist noticed that COVID-19 is one of the most contagious viruses in this era which its propagating infection ends up to severe pneumonitis that could be more fatal for whom suffering from constitutional diseases like diabetics, cardiovascular diseases, and malignancies. The majority of patients present symptoms of fever, dry coughs, sore throat, dyspnoea, and myalgia. Over 93 mutations have been found in the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2 which lead to different organ damages and develop various symptoms like diarrhoea, anosmia, ageusia, unilateral otalgia, and cutaneous lesions during the infection [1–3]. COVID-19 mostly spread through droplets by sneezing, coughing, or even talking of an infected person to a close-contacted one. Recently, the possibility of fecal-oral and vertical transmission from mother to child is suggested besides the currently confirmed droplet and direct contact transmissions [2,4]. In fact, COVID-19 is a highly contagious virus particularly in the first three days of symptom onset, and the more critical issue is that asymptomatic infections and transmissions have been reported. COVID-19 carriers could transmit the virus within the incubation period before the symptom appearance. The average incubation period for COVID-19 is 5.1 days but it varies from 0 to 12 days [5]. To decrease virus spreading speed, it is critical to distinguish symptomatic and asymptomatic patients as early as possible. Health workers have started to screen patients by using a thermometer or a pulse oximeter to detect the common symptoms. The screening methods do not seem significantly sensitive to distinguish patients at an acceptable level.