#185 How Iron Metabolism Worsens COVID19 with Dr Attilio Cavezzi

Attilio Cavezzi (0:00)

Looking at the laboratory data, somehow we saw that, in fact, there was a progressive decrease of chemoglobin in the blood of the majority of the patients with COVID-19, especially in the later stages, especially in the most critical situations, let's say. That was demonstrated by several articles.

And contemporaneously, we also checked many other articles and we also saw that ferritin, which is the, let's say, the iron, which is deposited in the tissues was extremely, extremely high.

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Siim Land (0:44)

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Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm a host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Attilio Cavezzi. Attilio is a vascular surgeon from Italy. His area of expertise is venous and lymphatic diseases. In this episode, we're going to talk about an alternative hypothesis for the cause of COVID-19.

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Attilio Cavezzi (2:08)

Yeah, I mean, we are doctors who are somehow taking care of COVID, or directly or indirectly, let's say. But at the end of the day, what's happening is still a kind of unknown, out breaking disease.

So, let's say that talking to each other and talking to several other doctors, we started to understand that there should have been something more than just what they call pneumonia since the very beginning. Of course, we don't know what's behind, but we are trying to put forward more hypotheses, let's say. We are talking just about hypotheses, not just about any sure and demonstrated process.

Siim Land (2:55)

Yeah, definitely. This entire thing has been a pretty, let's say, a lot of misinformation and also changing of narratives.

Initially, people thought that it was only a respiratory disease, but after a while, we kind of realized that it's actually much more than that and has many other, you know, consequent effects.

Attilio Cavezzi (3:25)

Yeah, in fact, I mean, everything, I mean, I'm dealing with vascular surgery and especially vaseline fatigue, but then I was fascinated, let's say, by integrative medicine and going ahead in the last years, I discovered that sometimes, medicine can widen the horizons. So talking to doctors, especially from the north of Italy, where we had and we have a lot of problems, let's say, I started to understand and they asked me, what else can we do? What else can we think about this disease? So to make it short, I started to read a lot and I started to talk to other friends, such as Dr. Troiani and Professor Corral. And we tried to elaborate on different possibilities, let's say, how to investigate and especially how to go ahead to manage this disease. Because from China we got the meaning that it was basically a pneumonia.

So going ahead, we started to see different findings. That's why the title of our publication, which is unfortunately just a narrative review, it's nothing demonstrated, let's say, but as a hypothesis. We thought that it was not just pneumonia and the title says, Hemoglobin Iron Hypoxia Beyond Inflammation. So it's a narrative review, but somehow we wanted to highlight that a few laboratory tests and other findings were not compatible just with pneumonia and the acute respiratory distress syndrome only and sepsis. I mean, that's something that happens, of course, in the latest stages. But we started to understand that not only the infection and inflammatory component in the lungs was the main issue, because immunology clearly demonstrated that this is a very important situation, very important process that happens in these patients.

But step by step, we started to understand that the series of, let's say, cardiovascular events, such as thrombosis, ischemia, myocardial infection were happening. Pulmonary embolism and the disseminated intravascular coagulation and multi-organ failure somehow was going on. So we started to read, we started to check the laboratory data and so on. And step by step, we started to introduce some more possible ideas.