Blood Thinners May Help Some People Hospitalized With COVID-19

• New research indicates blood thinners may be effective in treating people hospitalized with moderate COVID-19 symptoms.
• Researchers said the common medications can help break up smaller blood clots that may go unnoticed during treatments.
• They add that the worldwide collaboration on this study can set an example for future researchers.

A new tool for battling COVID-19 symptoms may already be in the hands of medical teams everywhere: blood thinners.

A newly released global analysis shows that in people hospitalized with moderate COVID-19 symptoms the use of blood thinners could be a key component to a quicker recovery and a decreased impact of symptoms.

“I think this is transformative,” Dr. Jeffrey S. Berger, a study author and director of the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at NYU Langone Health in New York, told Healthline.

“This will be so helpful,” he said. “Hospitals are overrun. Critical care is so overloaded. This study should have a major impact on that.”

The role blood clots play in moderate to severe COVID-19 cases became clear early on in the pandemic, Berger said.

He noted that at the onset medical teams saw “a lot of blood clots” in people with COVID-19 that were causing devastating side effects such as heart attacks, strokes, and lung damage.

Berger said it wasn’t until autopsy results became available that they noticed people who died from COVID-19 didn’t have large blood clots but rather showed “micro thrombosis,” smaller and more plentiful blood clots.

“All were contributing to the need for ventilators, kidney damage, and, yes, ultimately, death,” he said.