Fatigue is a common long-term COVID-19 symptom
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A study of nearly 700 people shows that people who were hospitalized with severe covid-19 and then infected with the coronavirus for a long time had elevated levels of a number of inflammatory immune molecules compared with people who fully recovered from the hospital.
Members of the research team said the findings show that the long-acting new coronavirus has a real biological basis Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London. “People don’t imagine this,” he said. “This does happen to them.”
Researchers believe that a sustained immune response may be responsible for long-term COVID-19 symptoms. There are already some approved treatments designed to reduce these reactions in other conditions, so these findings could lead to trials of these same drugs to treat long-term COVID-19.
However, it is unclear whether these findings apply to people who develop long-term COVID-19 infection after mild SARS-CoV-2 infection that does not require hospitalization.
Team members say that in some cases, a sustained immune response may also be due to persistent infection with SARS-CoV-2 or the activation of dormant viruses in the body, such as Epstein-Barr virus Liu Feifei, also at Imperial College. If so, suppressing the immune response may be counterproductive.
“Long-term infection is a complex condition,” Liu said. “There’s no single reason.”
Liu’s research She and her colleagues measured levels of 368 immune molecules in the blood of 659 patients hospitalized with covid-19, mostly early in the pandemic. The 426 people who still reported symptoms more than 3 months later were compared to the 233 people who reported full recovery.
The study found that patterns of immune activation mirrored the main types of symptoms reported by people with long-term COVID-19 infection. The five main symptom types are fatigue; cognitive impairment; anxiety and depression; cardiorespiratory symptoms; and gastrointestinal symptoms.
For example, people with gastrointestinal symptoms have higher blood levels of SCG3, and this signaling protein is also elevated in the stool of people with irritable bowel syndrome.
Team members say the findings won’t help diagnose whether people have long-term COVID-19 infections Chris Brightling at the University of Leicester, UK. But he said testing for these molecules could help reveal how long people have had COVID-19 once the illness is confirmed, and what kinds of interventions might help.
A study last year estimated 36 million people in Europe are infected or chronically infected with the new coronavirus. “A lot of people are still suffering,” Brightling said.
“I think it’s pretty clear from the results that differences in blood protein levels do exist, but the question remains how these differences arise, they may or may not lead to symptoms, and how that can lead to effective treatments,” said Kevin McConway In a statement released by the Open University’s Center for Science Media. “It’s still possible that these findings may not apply to people who have never been hospitalized with COVID-19,” he said.
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