Seattle [US], January 21 (ANI): A team of researchers has identified several factors that can be measured at the first point of covid-19 diagnosis that predict whether a patient is likely to develop long-term covid.
The study has been published in the ‘Cell Journal’.
A significant proportion of people affected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus – some estimates suggest more than 40 percent – suffer from chronic effects known as post-acute consequences of COVID-19 (PASC), commonly referred to as long covid. PASC symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, loss of taste and smell, shortness of breath and more.
These “PASC factors” are the presence of certain autoantibodies, pre-existing type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels in the blood and Epstein-Barr virus DNA levels in the blood.
“Identifying these PASC factors is a major step forward in not only understanding long-term covid and potentially treating it, but also which patients are most at risk for developing chronic conditions,” said ISB President Dr Jim Heath, co-author. to a research article.
“These findings also help us to frame our thinking about other chronic conditions, such as post-acute Lyme syndrome,” he added.
In addition, researchers found that mild cases of covid-19, not just severe cases, are associated with prolonged covid. They also suggested that administration of antiviral agents very early in the course of the disease could potentially prevent some PASC.
“Long-term covid causes significant morbidity in covid-19 survivors, but the pathobiology is poorly understood,” says Dr. Jason Goldman, co-author of the journal and expert on infectious diseases in Swedish.
“Our study pairs clinical data and patient-reported results with in-depth multiomic analyzes to unravel important biological relationships that occur in patients with PASC. for the development of drugs to treat long-term covid “, he added.
Researchers collected blood and swabs from 309 COVID-19 patients at different time points to perform extensive phenotyping that was integrated with clinical data and patient-reported symptoms to perform an in-depth multiomic longitudinal examination.
A key finding from the study is the amount of virus, which can be measured close to diagnosis to predict long covid symptoms.
“We found that early blood viral measurements are strongly associated with certain long-term covid symptoms that patients will develop months later,” says Dr. Yapeng Su, one of the first and corresponding authors of the magazine.
In addition, researchers found that the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) – a virus that infects 90 percent of the human population and is normally inactive in the body after infection – is reactivated early after SARS-CoV-2 infection, which is significant in future long covid symptoms.
“This may be related to immune destruction during COVID-19 infection,” Su added.
The team also found that PASC is predicted by autoantibodies (which are associated with autoimmune diseases such as lupus) at diagnosis and that as autoantibodies increase, protective SARS-CoV-2 antibodies decrease. This suggested an association between long-term covid, autoantibodies and patients at increased risk of re-infections.
“Many patients with high autoantibodies also have low (protective) antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV-2, and this will make them more susceptible to breakthrough infections,” said Daniel Chen, one of the first authors of the journal.
The research project was a collaboration between ISB, Providence, Swedish University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Stanford, UCLA, UCSF, and more. (ANI)
Source: sn.dk