Israeli scientists have identified coronavirus proteins that harm blood vessels and increase the risk of stroke.
The research could lead to the development of new drugs that prevent damage to the vascular system resulting from COVID infection.
The team created a simulation of the vascular system and observed the impact of the 29 proteins that make up the virus.
The researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel then identified the five proteins that damage blood vessels.
Ben Maoz of the university’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience said:
“We have not only discovered which proteins have an impact on the vascular system, but also seen how exactly they exert their effect.
“What we found is these specific proteins make your vasculature more leaky.
“The tubes become more porous and cannot hold liquid as you would hope.”
Moaz noted that there was a very high incidence of strokes and heart attacks among COVID patients.
Coronavirus patients are up to three times more likely to have a stroke or heart attack than the rest of the population, the researcher said.
Moaz said that that the virus ‘has been treated as a single entity’ despite the many different ways in which it attacks the body.
The researcher said: “This work could well help scientists to develop drugs to counter the effect of the coronavirus on the vascular system, by providing an understanding of exactly which proteins, or pieces of the virus, are causing problems.”
Research published two weeks ago found that COVID infection was associated with a greater risk of developing a rare stroke than a dose of the vaccine.
The study published in Nature Medicine draw upon data from 32 million patient records from England.
Patients having the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had an increased risk of haemorrhagic stroke in the 28 days after their first jab at a rate of 60 extra cases per 10 million people vaccinated.
However, Covid infection carried a much greater risk of developing complications than either the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine or the Oxford AstraZeneca jab, which was linked to rare cases of Bell’s palsy and Guillain-Barre syndrome.
