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Postmortem Lung Findings in an Asthmatic with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Chest. 2020 Apr 28;:
Authors: Konopka KE, Wilson A, Myers JL
Abstract
Asthma is increasingly recognized as an underlying risk factor for severe respiratory disease in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients, particularly in the United States. Here, we report the postmortem lung findings from a 37-year-old asthmatic man, who met the clinical criteria for severe acute respiratory distress syndrome and died of COVID-19 less than two weeks after presentation to the hospital. His lungs showed mucus plugging and other histologic changes attributable to asthma, as well as early diffuse alveolar damage (DAD) and a fibrinous pneumonia. The presence of DAD is similar to descriptions of autopsy lung findings from patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS), and the absence of a neutrophil-rich acute bronchopneumonia differs from the histologic changes typical of influenza. The relative contribution of mucus plugging to his hypoxemia is unknown.
PMID: 32360729 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]