Researchers say they have found biological risk factors that could help determine who is more likely to get “long COVID.”
On Tuesday, a U.S.-based team said it had done a deep multiomic, long-term study of more than 200 COVID-19 patients from the time they were first diagnosed to when they were back at home two or three months later.
A “multiomics” is a way to analyze information from different omic groups at once.
Many different types of biology are called “omics,” like genomics.
The study, which used both clinical and patient-reported data, found that Type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 RNAemia, Epstein-Barr virus viremia, and specific autoantibodies were all present at the time of the first diagnosis.
In people who had long gastrointestinal COVID, T cells were unique in that they became cytotoxic after they started growing.
The British Society for Immunology says that cytotoxic T cells, primarily made in the thymus, kill virus-infected cells and tumors.
Analysis of symptom-associated immunological signatures showed that coordinated immunity polarization, was found in four different health conditions with different acute severity and long COVID.
How The Surveys Went?
People who took part in the study, led by Jim Heath, said that 37 percent of them had three or more symptoms of long COVID two or three months after they were infected, the New York Times reported.
Twenty-four percent said they had one or two symptoms, and 39 percent said they didn’t have any.
People who had been sick for a long time were asked about their symptoms, and researchers analyzed blood and nasal swabs over time.
People who had three or more symptoms when they were diagnosed were 95 percent likely to have one or more of the four biological factors found in the study when they were first diagnosed.
Heath told the magazine that autoantibodies were linked to two-thirds of the cases of long COVID that he saw.
It checked some of its findings with 100 patients and with data from 457 healthy people.
When patients go to the doctor, they’ll say that they’re tired all the time or something, and the doctor tells them to get more sleep. Researchers did this analysis because we knew that this would happen. Not very useful.
So, they wanted to be able to say for sure that there was something wrong with these people, as he stated.
The study’s author says more research will need to be done after this.
After being infected, people can have long COVID conditions for up to four or more weeks, based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Some people who have had a terrible reaction to COVID-19 have multiple organ issues or autoimmune disorders, and children can have a multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS).
According to the CDC, people who have COVID-19 can have problems breathing, brain fog, joint or muscle pain, sleep problems, mood swings, a change in their menstrual cycle, and a change in smell or taste. These symptoms don’t include other post-COVID conditions that are more common in people who have had a severe illness.
As of July, COVID conditions that last a long time can be a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
