BACKGROUND: COVID-19 and other respiratory viral infections can cause cardiovascular complications. SARS-CoV-2 virions are found in the blood, and circulating viral RNA levels are associated with death. We hypothesized that viremia can induce thrombotic endotheliopathy that contributes to death and studied this relationship in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 and enrolled in the ACTIV-4a (Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines) randomized trial of antithrombotic therapy. METHODS: We quantified SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid RNA and protein in plasma and measured their associations with clinical outcomes and biomarkers of thromboinflammation and endotheliopathy. We used Cox regression and Fine-Gray competing risk models to analyze survival and thrombosis. We conducted causal mediation analysis to explore whether thrombotic endotheliopathy mediates the relationship between viral RNA and death. RESULTS: =0.048) after adjustment for age and sex of the relationship between viral RNA and the 90-day mortality rate. CONCLUSIONS: Elevated plasma SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels are associated with death in ACTIV-4a, which is causally mediated in part by soluble thrombomodulin. We propose that lung-blood viral dissemination is a potential mechanism for cardiovascular complications of respiratory viruses. REGISTRATION: URL: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov; Unique Identifier: NCT04505774.
Zuchelkowski et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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