Media attention turned to a case report in The Lancet detailing how a man’s legs would turn blue after standing for about 10 minutes, which researchers said is likely related to his long COVID.
The 33-year-old man told doctors that for the past 6 months, his legs would feel progressively heavy, tingly, and itchy, and then would become “dusky” in color, according to medical student Nafi Iftekhar and Manoj Sivan, MD, of the Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine at the University of Leeds in England.
In addition, a petechial rash would occasionally appear on his feet, they reported. His legs would return to a normal color and the symptoms would go away when he would lay down.
Iftekhar and Sivan diagnosed the patient with “dysautonomia secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection and associated with long COVID.”
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Bruce Hirsch, MD, an infectious disease physician at Northwell Health in Manhasset, New York, noted that the symptom of blue legs “doesn’t seem that different from what we’ve been hearing over the last couple of years, like COVID toes … and we know that the circulation is impacted in many people with the complications of long COVID.”
