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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease that has a potential of causing cardiovascular illness. Cardiac outcomes of COVID-19 mainly include acute coronary syndrome, heart failure, and left ventricular dysfunction. However, pericardial involvement is very rare. Here, we present a case of pericarditis and pericardial effusion in a known hypertensive COVID-19 patient. Our case was a diagnostic dilemma as the literature review mentioned that cardiovascular manifestations are mostly reported in symptomatic and critically ill patients of COVID-19. However, this patient has no viral respiratory illness, and is otherwise healthy.

This report evaluates plasma protein patterns, dialysates and protein analysis of used dialysis membranes from the same patient under hemodialysis in three separate modalities, using high-flux membranes in concentration-driven transport (HD), convection-driven hemofiltration (HF) and combined hemodialfiltration (HDF). The plasma protein changes induced by each of the three dialysis modalities showed small differences in proteins identified towards our previous plasma analyses of chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients. The used dialysate peptide concentrations likewise exhibited small differences among the modalities and varied in the same relative order as the plasma changes, with protein losses in the order HD>HDF>HF. The membrane protein deposits allowed quantification of the relative Hb removal ratios as ~1.7 for HD and ~1.2 for HDF vs. ~1.0 for HF. Hence, plasma protein alterations, dialysate peptide contents and membrane Hb deposits all identify HD as the modality with the most extensive filtration results and exemplifies the accessibility of protein analysis of used membrane filters for evaluation of dialysis efficiencies.

In patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), peptides and proteins circulate at altered concentrations versus in healthy individuals. We have characterized proteome samples from 7 pooled CKD stage 5 patients not yet on dialysis and with no known co-morbidities. We also analyzed pooled plasma samples from 7 healthy age- and sex-matched controls. After immunodepletion of the 6 most abundant plasma proteins, HPLC and SDS-PAGE patterns differed between the healthy and disease groups. The differing proteins were identified by peptide mass fingerprinting using MALDI mass spectrometry and verified with electrospray tandem mass spectrometry sequence analysis. Multiple differences in at least 19 HPLC fractions were observed, from which we identified 29 proteins, 25 in greater yield and 4 in lower yield than in the healthy controls, adding at least 6 protein components to those that were previously known to be altered in CKD.

To complement an earlier analysis of protein alterations in plasma from uremic versus healthy subjects by addition of further LC-MS/MS analysis to the previously used MALDI-TOF mass analyses.Sequence identifications of tryptic peptides from SDS gel electrophoretic fractions of immunodepleted and HPLC-fractionated plasma was performed from seven chronic kidney disease stage 5 patients (age 55 ± 14 years, glomerular filtration rate 6.9 ±2.9 mL/minute/1.73 m2) and from seven matched controls.About twice as many proteins were increased in uremic plasma as the previously identified. The identifications included proteins that consistently complement the two identification patterns regarding separate subunits from the same protein complex.Mass spectrometric analysis is applicable to complex plasma proteomes in clinical settings. The LC-MS/MS technique, based on individual peptide sequence analyses, gives increased identifications and also demonstrates feasibility of this technique in clinical practice.