SARS-CoV-2 Impact on Red Blood Cell Morphology

Severe COVID-19 alters the biochemical and morphological characteristics of blood cells in a wide variety of ways. To date, however, the vast majority of research has been devoted to the study of leukocytes, while erythrocyte morphological changes have received significantly less attention. The aim...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biomedicines 2023-10, Vol.11 (11), p.2902
Main Authors: Kondratov, Kirill A, Artamonov, Alexander A, Mikhailovskii, Vladimir Yu, Velmiskina, Anastasiya A, Mosenko, Sergey V, Grigoryev, Evgeniy A, Anisenkova, Anna Yu, Nikitin, Yuri V, Apalko, Svetlana V, Sushentseva, Natalya N, Ivanov, Andrey M, Scherbak, Sergey G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blood
Cell size
COVID-19
Cytokine storm
Cytology
erythrocyte
Erythrocytes
Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid
Health aspects
Leukocytes
low-voltage scanning electron microscopy
Morphology
Oxygen saturation
Pandemics
Physical characteristics
red blood cells
Scanning electron microscopy
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
severe COVID-19
Statistical analysis
Viral infections
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Severe COVID-19 alters the biochemical and morphological characteristics of blood cells in a wide variety of ways. To date, however, the vast majority of research has been devoted to the study of leukocytes, while erythrocyte morphological changes have received significantly less attention. The aim of this research was to identify erythrocyte morphology abnormalities that occur in COVID-19, compare the number of different poikilocyte types, and measure erythrocyte sizes to provide data on size dispersion. Red blood cells obtained from 6 control donors (800–2200 cells per donor) and 5 COVID-19 patients (800–1900 cells per patient) were examined using low-voltage scanning electron microscopy. We did not discover any forms of erythrocyte morphology abnormalities that would be specific to COVID-19. Among COVID-19 patients, we observed an increase in the number of acanthocytes (p = 0.01) and a decrease in the number of spherocytes (p = 0.03). In addition, our research demonstrates that COVID-19 causes an increase in the median (p = 0.004) and interquartile range (p = 0.009) when assessing erythrocyte size. The limitation of our study is a small number of participants.
ISSN:2227-9059
2227-9059
DOI:10.3390/biomedicines11112902