Mike Hanes, Dr. Marco Hefti and Terry Anderson

Dr. Marco Hefti participated in an NIH-led study documenting microvascular injury in the brains of patients succumbing to COVID-19. The results were recently published as a letter entitled Microvascular Injury in the Brains of Patients with Covid-19 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In collaboration with the UIHC Decedent Care Center, as well as forensic and family consent autopsy faculty in Pathology, Dr. Marco Hefti collected brain tissue from patients dying of COVID-19 at UIHC early in the course of the epidemic. These cases require special precautions and resources, making many institutions reluctant to undertake critical autopsy examination of these patients. Dr. Hefti was one of the first investigators to respond to a request for brain tissue from COVID patient from Dr. Avindra Nath at the National Institutes of Health, and became part of a consortium including the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the NIH which sought to characterize the effects of COVID-19 on the brain. Their findings used a combination of high-resolution post-mortem MRI imaging and histopathology to demonstrate a previously undescribed form of microvascular injury in the brains of COVID-19 victims.

View the letter to the Editor by Lee et al in the New England Journal of Medicine.