According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 10% to 20% of patients who have been infected by the coronavirus can develop the so-called long covid, characterized by symptoms that appear three months after treatment and can last for 60 days. The condition is so debilitating that a British patient has decided to pay more than £40,000 to travel abroad and have his blood “washed out” in a procedure known as apheresis, which has not been proven effective in this case.
This is one of the cases reported in an investigation released by the scientific journal British Medical Journal (BMJ) last Tuesday (12/7). Thousands of patients are traveling to private clinics in Cyprus, Germany and Switzerland to undergo the blood-filtering treatment that is normally recommended for those who have lipid disorders and do not respond to medication.
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In an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph, researcher Shamil Haroon, from the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, who studies long covid, says that experimental treatments such as apheresis should only be used in clinical trials.
“It is not surprising that people who were previously highly functional, who are now debilitated, cannot work and cannot support themselves financially, seek treatment elsewhere. It’s a completely rational response to a situation like this. But people can go broke accessing these treatments, for which there is not enough evidence of effectiveness,” comments Haroon.
In apheresis, needles used in transfusion are placed in each arm so the blood passes through a filter, where red blood cells are separated from plasma. This is filtered before being recombined with red blood cells and returned to the body through another vein.
The BMJ report shows the case of the Dutch psychiatrist Gitte Boumeester, who lives in Almelo, who spent more than 50,000 euros (R$ 272,500) to have this treatment in Cyprus.
British businessman Chris Witham, 45, who lives in Bournemouth, has been suffering from long-term covid and decided to spend around £7,000 on apheresis in Germany last year. “I would have sold or given up my house to improve, without thinking twice”, comments the businessman to the scientific journal.
The problem is that none of these two patients improved the symptoms of long covid. Only six people contacted by the BMJ said they believed the treatment helped in any way.
In February last year, doctor Beate Jaeger began treating this type of patient with apheresis at her clinic in Mulheim, Germany, after reading reports that long-term covid would be associated with blood clotting problems.
In conversation with the BMJ, the doctor says that she has treated thousands of people in her clinic and that, although she accepts that the procedure is experimental, the pandemic has left patients desperately sick and unable to wait for clinical trials.
This is the case of British pulmonologist Asad Khan, who lives in Manchester. For him, specialists should consider off-label prescribing (outside the authorized recommendation) of certain drugs, such as anticoagulants, after talking to the patient about risks and benefits. “We need to get out of this slavish adherence to the guidelines […] Let’s think outside the box and offer trial treatment to patients and see if they benefit from it,” Khan tells the BMJ.
He performed no less than 21 apheresis sessions at Beate Jaeger’s clinic in Mülheim. Added to other treatments such as triple anticoagulation and cranial osteopathy, Asad Khan reportedly spent around £40,000.
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