An Iowa woman’s nasal swab test for Covid-19 caused her to leak spinal fluid, her doctors said, adding that this type of novel appears to be her first reported injury related to the coronavirus. But don’t worry too much about something like this happening to you during the swab test – the unfortunate accident was likely only possible because the woman inadvertently had a rare congenital condition that left part of her skull.
There was a case report Published Thursday Scientific Journal JMA to Tolerangology – Head and Neck Surgery. The woman went to her doctor with complaints of runny nose, sore throat, headache, sensitivity to light and strange metallic taste in the mouth, the report said. A physical examination revealed a mass on the right side of her nasal cavity, while tests on the woman’s snout showed that she had spinal fluid.
While they were trying to get sick with each other, the woman told doctors she had recently received a swab test for Covid-19 as a precaution before her selective hernia surgery. Immediately, he began to have a runny nose and headache, as well as vomiting. Once she took the MRI, the problem was clearly identified. The woman, it turned out, had something called encephalitis: the brain substance, the membrane, and the spinal fluid-like sac that protrudes from the opening of the skull should not be there.
Encephalocell (pronounced n-safe-a-lo-seal) is Rare birth defects, U.S. They are thought to affect only one in 10,000 newborns a year. They occur when the neural tube – the forerunner of the central nervous system in the fetus – does not develop properly, causing some of our skull bones to not fuse normally. . They are usually large enough to be easily noticed on an ultrasound or once the baby is delivered. But sometimes, especially when the openings are around the nasal cavity, they are still as small as many decades ago, as it happened to an Iowa woman in her 40s. In this case, her encephalitis was actually found on a CT scan taken three years ago in 2017, but at the time doctors only diagnosed her to have a sinus infection.
G / O media can get commission
While nasal swabs certainly feel unpleasant (speaking from personal experience), in this case doctors think the swab punctured his skull hard enough to leak on its own. Doctors have reported injuries to the nasal cavity due to leakage of spinal fluid, but it usually occurs during a surgical procedure. So while this may be the first report of spinal fluid leakage attached to the swab test for the Covid-19, here are probably some of the heaviest composite circumstances.
“We therefore theorize that the swab itself did not result in a violation of the skeletal base of the bone, but that the invasive test shocked the patient’s pre-existing encephalocele,” the authors wrote.
Speaking of the woman, the doctors were able to successfully drain some of her encephalitis and plug the start with a tissue graft.
As rare as this series of events may be, the authors suggest that people with a known history of similar skull defects or previous sinus injuries test for Covid-19 in ways other than nasal swabs. Now there are saliva tests available Some evidence Suggests they may be as accurate as a nasal swab. And health care workers can swab the back of the throat instead of the inside of the nasal cavity. But so far, these methods are still not as widely accessible or applicable as nasal swab testing.
.
