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Some other people with COVID-19 would possibly expand a COVID toe, where numbers can swell and discolor.
Mr. Nirenberg
As we approach our third pandemic winter, most people are all too familiar with COVID-19 symptoms. The disease has many other faces and can manifest as chills, cough, shortness of breath, or other annoying mixtures of symptoms. But this the disease can definitely appear peculiar.
Rarely, SARS-CoV-2 increases in parts of the body that are not regularly affected by respiratory viruses. From head to toe, doctors have noticed a multitude of cases. be worrisome for patients, says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco.
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But customers don’t have to be. That’s because those symptoms can go away on their own, says Chin-Hong, who has treated many other people with COVID-19.
No one knows precisely how often COVID tongue, COVID toe, COVID eye, or other rare situations occur, and it’s not clear that COVID-19 is the real culprit. However, the large scale of coronavirus infections means that SARS-CoV-2 has had many opportunities to show itself (SN: 08/09/22). The United States now has 98 million instances displayed. Such a staggering amount of instances means that “statistically speaking, you’ll find other people with more and more strange things,” Chin-Hong says.
Doctors rely on medical case reports to locate clues about possible remedies and clues about how long symptoms last. Even knowing that someone else has had mouth sores or sensitive feet can be helpful, Chin-Hong says. It allows him to tell his patients, “You’re not alone,” he says. “It means a lot to a lot of people. “
Internal medicine physician Saira Caughtai published one such study in October in the Journal of Medical Case Reports after one of his number one care patients arrived with a symptom Caughtai had never seen. Ten days after testing positive for COVID-19, the patient’s tongue began to swell, eventually bursting into white-ring lesions.
Some areas appeared “bare,” says Chaughtai of Hackensack Meridian Health in Neptune, New Jersey. It was as if some of the bumps on the surface of the tongue had been sanded. The patient was also not someone doctors would sometimes leave vulnerable. 30 years, have compatibility and healthy.
“I like, ‘Oh my God, COVID can do anything,'” Caughtai recalls.
The mouth sores would likely look at other patients. Chin-Hong saw other people with tongues covered in white, as if they had chewed a bite of tortilla chips. For Caughtai’s patient, the COVID tongue was tender and irritated, with fiery outbreaks. Chaughtai didn’t know how to treat it.
He searched the clinical literature and prescribed a collection of mouthwashes, which helped. But six months later, the patient’s tongue hadn’t completely healed. So Caughtai got creative. He teamed up with a sports doctor, who sent a gentle low-intensity laser to the patient’s tongue. In the past, I had used this photobiomodulation treatment to treat muscle injuries.
The gentle laser treatment dilates blood vessels, achieving better blood flow to the treated areas, which can only promote healing, Caughtai says. It seemed good to his patient. The tongue lesions began to heal and the outbreaks subsided. The woman still sometimes feels some tenderness in the tongue when she is stressed, but never as severe as her initial outbreak.
About 1300 kilometers to the west, a podiatrist from Crown Point, Indiana, also dilated a patient’s blood vessels to treat a curious coronavirus-related illness: COVID toe. After SARS-CoV-2 infection, patients’ hands and feet may swell, hurt, and turn pink or reddish purple.
“We’ve noticed instances of those injuries that look like frostbite, which is what you get when you’re exposed to blood,” says Michael Nirenberg of Friendly Foot Care. But his patients had not been in the blood, but had been exposed to coronavirus.
Nirenberg has noticed as many as 40 other people with the symptom, which he says tends to go away within a month or two. But one of his patients, a 59-year-old man, simply couldn’t quit COVID. It eventually persisted for nearly 670 days, the longest documented case Nirenberg has ever noticed. “The term we use COVID long toe,” he says. Nirenberg and his colleagues reported the case this spring in the Journal of Cutaneous Pathology.
Nirenberg prescribed daily application of nitroglycerin ointment to stimulate blood in the toes. It probably would have helped, Nirenberg says, “but I don’t know if the timing worked too. “After 22 months, the condition would possibly have disappeared despite everything resolved on its own.
The number of COVID feet Nirenberg encounters those days has decreased, but he still sees other people coming with the condition. And while Caughtai hasn’t treated the COVID case, a man emailed her recently saying he had been suffering from a similar condition. for two years.
UCSF’s Chin-Hong says she believes it’s vital for others to know that COVID-19 can cause a variety of symptoms (SN: 11/11/22). “We can’t really wait for who will get what,” he says. But in his experience, strange symptoms tend to appear more in other people who haven’t been vaccinated.
Such symptoms may not be as severe as the hearts or lungs affected by COVID, but they can be scary, Chin-Hong says. “If that’s an explanation for why other people might get vaccinated,” he says, “I think that would be great. “
S. Chaughtai, Z. Chaughtai and A. Asif. Conservative remedy with mouthwashes followed by cure of photobiomodulation of the tongue in Covid-19: about a case. Journal of medical case reports. Vol. 16, October 6, 2022. doi: 10. 1186/s13256-022-03519-z.
MADAM. Nirenberg et al. Histopathology of a long toe Persistent COVID: about a case. Journal of skin pathology. Published April 2, 2022. doi: 10. 1111/cup. 14240.
Meghan Rosen is a life scientist for Science News. He earned a Ph. D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with a concentration in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and then graduated from the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz.
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