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 persist and require lifelong management
Aside from the loss of her sense of smell last June, Tajma Hodzick had none of the telltale signs of a COVID infection.
“I didn’t even completely lose my sense of taste. It was mostly just a sense of smell, ”she recalled.
But within a few days of a positive test, the 31-year-old woman began to experience more serious side effects. Blisters appeared on her hands, rashes on her legs and arms, and her joints began to swell.
“I also started to get some pain in my feet. I ended up in the emergency room just because the swelling was really big on my hands. I had blisters, ”said Hodzick. “I couldn’t wash my hands because I couldn’t rub them together; it hurt so bad. “
A new article published in the magazine Skeletal Radiology confirmed and documented the causes of these types of symptoms through CT scans, MRIs and ultrasound.
“In some patients, COVID-19 triggers an autoimmune response, meaning the virus can trick the body into attacking itself,” explains Dr. Swati Deshmukh, a 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 imaging has shown signs of improvement, but for other patients, and especially those with these autoimmune diseases triggered by COVID-19, they need lifelong treatment,” said Deshmukh.
In some cases, Dr. Deshmukh believes that these types of inflammatory reactions can mysteriously occur without other common symptoms of the coronavirus.
“They may not even know they are infected with the virus, and later they develop muscle and nerve problems with joints,” she said.
The imaging, she says, can help explain the origin of the symptoms and guide post-COVID-19 treatments by a rheumatologist or dermatologist.
After two hospital admissions and three biopsies, Hodzick was finally diagnosed with COVID-induced psoriatic arthritis. It could be one of the first of its kind.
The chronic condition now requires her to take medication on a daily basis.
“We really don’t know if once it works out of my system, what that will look like,” she said. ‘If at some point I start weaning off the medication or if those symptoms come back. So now it really is a pretty big unknown. “
It’s another long-lasting symptom that experts say proves how much remains to be learned about the virus’s lingering effects.