Long COVID patients seek 'blood washing' treatment, experts concerned for safety

A shocking investigative feature piece by BMJ revealed that patients with long COVID are seeking a “blood washing treatment” in private clinics in Cyprus, Germany and Switzerland — but medical experts are concerned about the patients’ safety.

To conduct the treatment, known as apheresis, large needles are pushed into veins and the blood is “filtered” by removal of lipids and inflammatory proteins. Apheresis is recommended by the German Society of Nephrology as a last resort for lipid disorders.

“I am worried these patients have been offered therapies which have not been assessed by modern scientific methods: well-designed clinical trials,” said Beverley Hunt, medical director of the charity Thrombosis UK quoted in BMJ. 

“In this situation, the treatment may or may not benefit them but, worryingly, also has the risk of harm.”

Gitte Boumeester caught SARS-CoV-2 in November 2020. Desperate for a cure, she spent nearly half her savings to try the blood washing treatment with Lamarca’s Long COVID Center — but found no improvement in her health.

“I do think they should emphasise the experimental nature of the treatments more, especially because it’s so expensive,” Boumeester said. “I realised before I started that the outcome was uncertain, but everyone at the clinic is so positive that you start to believe it too and get your hopes up.”

Beate Jaeger, who runs the Lipid Centre North Rhine and Markus Klotz, who founded the Long COVID Centre in Cyprus, believe that micro clots are linked to long COVID symptoms. 

They quote research by Etheresia Pretorius, a professor in physiological sciences at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, to justify their blood washing treatment and anticoagulation therapy.

However, some medical experts say that there needs to be more research showing that micro clots are linked to long COVID before treatment is practised.

“They [microclots] may be a biomarker for disease, but how do we know they are causal?” said Robert Ariens, professor of vascular biology at the University of Leeds School of Medicine. 

“If we don’t know the mechanisms by which the micro clots form and whether or not they are causative of disease, it seems premature to design a treatment to take the micro clots away, as both apheresis and triple anticoagulation are not without risks, the obvious one being bleeding,” he continued.

Either way, there is no published peer-reviewed evidence which proves that apheresis and anticoagulation therapy reduces micro lots.

He added: “As we don’t know how they form, we cannot tell if this treatment will stop micro clots from recurring.”