In a study published in the journal The Lancet, a patient with a protracted case of Covid had extraordinary leg blueness after 10 minutes of standing.
The instance of a 33-year-old man who developed acrocyanosis, or blood pooling in the legs’ veins, was discussed in the study.
His legs started to turn red about a minute after he stood up, and they gradually turned blue with more visible veins as time went on, according to a study from the University of Leeds in the UK.
After ten minutes of standing, the color was noted to become considerably more noticeable, and the patient reported feeling heavy and itching in his legs.
However, two minutes after he resumed a non-standing position, his original color was seen to reappear.
According to the study’s authors, the patient reported that the discoloration began to affect him after contracting COVID-19.
“This was a striking case of acrocyanosis in a patient who had not experienced it before his COVID-19 infection,” said Manoj Sivan, the study’s lead author and an associate clinical professor at the university’s School of Medicine.
The patient was subsequently identified as having POTS, a disorder that causes an abnormal increase in heart rate upon standing.
The autonomic nerve system, which controls bodily functions including heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, digestion, and sexual arousal, is one of the systems that Long Covid has been proven to influence. Dysautonomia, a typical sign of post-viral syndromes, has been seen in children with autonomic nervous system malfunction (acrocyanosis) in the past.
Patients who experience this might not be aware that it can be a sign of dysautonomia or long-term COVID and may worry about what they are witnessing. Similar to that, doctors could not be aware of the connection between lengthy Covid and acrocyanosis, according to Sivan.
Previous studies by Sivan’s group have demonstrated that POTS and dysautonomia frequently manifest in Long Covid patients.
Numerous additional chronic illnesses, including fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis, generally known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME, which both weaken muscles and cause discomfort, exhibit dysautonomia. According to the researchers, the patient’s case illustrated the need for people with this illness to be more aware of this symptom.
Sivan underlined that it is crucial to promote awareness of dysautonomia in long-term Covid in order to provide doctors with the tools they need to manage patients properly.
The ability of long-term cancer patients to carry out daily chores and their quality of life, which in certain cases has been found to be worse than that of patients with advanced disease, are both considerably impaired by the symptoms of the disease, which include fatigue, brain fog, sorrow, and anxiety.
