United States: In a study, authors revealed that patients with long COVID symptoms had higher odds of testing positive for covid proteins in their blood, implying that A persistent viral reservoir may cause some long COVID symptoms.
More about the news
A team of researchers screened the blood of 706 different people and discovered that 43 percent of them who had multisystem-long COVID symptoms had viral proteins detected many months after their initial infection, while only 21 percent of people without symptoms had the same.
This finding suggests there can be an advantage in using antiviral treatments for having continuous after-effects.
Nevertheless, the study also confirms that not all patients with the long COVID continue detecting the viral proteins, meaning there are other factors behind this syndrome, neurosciencenews.com reported.
What more are the findings?
People experiencing a broad range of long Covid have significantly higher levels of covid proteins in their blood than those who are not experiencing long Covid, according to a study by Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Some of the most frequent long COVID symptoms were fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, muscle pain, joint pain, backache, headache, sleep disruption, loss of smell or taste, and gastrointestinal issues.
More specifically, the team determined that 43 percent had detectable viral proteins for 1 to 14 months after being positive if they had long COVID symptoms linked to the cardiopulmonary, musculoskeletal, or neurologic systems.
However, just 21 percent of those who did not experience any long COVID symptoms during this time found the SARS-CoV-2 biomarkers in their system.
According to lead author Zoe Swank, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology at BWH, “If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms,” neurosciencenews.com reported.
In the study, researchers analyzed 1,569 blood samples collected from 706 people, including 392 participants from the National Institutes of Health-supported Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) step, who had previously tested positive for COVID infection.
Employing an advanced technology called Single-molecule array or Simoa, the scientists tried to identify whole and partial proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Participants were also asked to give details regarding their Long Covid manifestations, employing either the electronic medical chart data or the surveys that were collected concurrently with the blood samples.
This would tend to suggest that a chronic infection might account for some but certainly not all of the long COVID patients’ symptoms.