Vision loss in Coronavirus recovered patient, docs call it rare complications of COVID
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Bengaluru: After a case of vision loss in a COVID recovered patient at Surat in Gujrat, a similar case has appeared before the Bengaluru hospital. A Covid patient was brought to Ace Suhas hospital in a sick status with a saturation level of 70%.
"He started recovering in a couple of days with treatment. However; on the third day he complained of a severe headache which was treated symptomatically. The next day he had a blurring of vision in the right eye. Diagnosed glaucoma! Retinal artery occlusion and glaucoma are rare complications of Covid. These happen due to the vasculitis associated with it.
If undetected or unattended it will lead to blindness," Dr Jagadish Hiremath, CEO of Ace Suhas Hospital said.
Commenting further about his experience, "We have seen both of these in 2 different patients who got admitted with us for Covid treatment. The virus is behaving differently in some of the cases and a profound clinical trial should establish the correlation between the cases and the Covid. Also there have been instances in Gujarat where over 40 patients have complained about blurring of vision and blindness."
The patient was referred to the Victoria Hospital's Ophthalmology department.
Dr. Ashwin Santosh Shetty, Consultant, Ophthalmology at Aster CMI Hospital opined that though there has been a lot of news going around the complications of Retinal artery occlusion being caused by Covid, there is not enough data and research on these complications.
"These are rare conditions and are not exclusive to Covid-19 infection. There are multiple factors which can lead to such conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes and hypertension. As diabetic and hypertensive patients are already vulnerable to complications of Covid-19 infection, they may face such issues as the virus has been found to trigger any underlying conditions," Shetty said.
His experience also suggests that such conditions may happen even in non Covid patients and currently there is no treatment for occlusion, and the only precaution that people and diabetic patients can take is to keep their sugar levels in check with proper medicine, diet and exercise