A neurologist physician in Iran says that 25 COVID-19 patients in one hospital had strokes, indicating that the virus played a role in developing blood clots.

Doctor Farzad Ashrafi who works in a hospital in Tajrish, in the northern part of the Iranian capital Tehran, told a local TV news channel that close to half of these patients were under the age of fifty.

There are 1,700 COVID-19 patients in the Tajrish hospital, according to Ashrafi.

A doctors’ association in Iran dealing with strokes announced an increase in the number of strokes in hospitals recently. Iran has more than 100,000 confirmed coronavirus cases so far.

The spokesperson of Iran’s health ministry Kianoush Jahanpour also said last week that health officials have received reports about “thrombotic brain attacks among some COVID-19 patients”.

There have been reports at least since last month in world media about this phenomenon. Some doctors say that there might be a viral cause for blood clots developing among coronavirus-stricken patients.

Australia’s ABC news, among others, has reported on these cases. Thomas Oxley, an Australian doctor who is now at New York’s Mt Sinai Hospital told the network that medical science might have just “discovered a new mechanism of stroke”.

Dr. Oxley says the virus might be interacting with blood vessel walls and quickly developing blood clots. He adds that this “is something very new in medicine”.

Iranian health officials have not released any comprehensive data on such cases, except the report about the Martyrs’ Hospital in Tajrish.