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Updated Thursday, January 18, 2024-19:58

Analysis of blood samples from patients with persistent Covid, a debilitating condition with unknown causes, has found changes in serum proteins to be a possible culprit.

The findings highlight potential biomarkers for the diagnosis of this condition and could shed light on treatment of the condition.

Not everyone fully recovers from Covid-19.

About 20% of patients diagnosed with it and about 5% of all people infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop persistent symptoms, called

Long Covid

, which can persist for many months.

A work published in the journal

Science

has analyzed the set of proteins present in the blood of 113 people with Covid-19 and 39 healthy people.

Carlo Cervia-Hasler and his team from the University of Zurich, Mount Sinai Hospital and Imperial College London, among other institutions, have revealed discoveries that have emerged from a longitudinal analysis of blood serum from

113 patients

who

fully recovered from Covid-19 or developed persistent Covid

, as well as healthy controls.

Using high-throughput proteomic approaches, the researchers measured serum levels of 6,596 human proteins in study participants.

According to their results, patients with persistent Covid had a greater amount of proteins related to complement activation, a system related to the inflammatory and immune response.

Additionally, there was an increase in antibodies against cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus.

According to the authors, "available therapies targeting the terminal complement pathway could offer new treatment strategies for persistent Covid."

"This work, published by Swiss scientists in the prestigious journal

Science,

used advanced methods called proteomics to analyze the blood (serum) of patients with and without persistent covid at 6 and 12 months after infection," explains David Lynn, professor of Systems Immunology at Flinders University and at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), a

Science Media Center Australia

(SMCA).

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Additionally, Lynn notes that "these analyzes indicate that a key component of our innate immune system, called the complement system, is dysregulated in people with persistent Covid. More importantly, this finding was replicated in an independent cohort from the United States. Joined".

The Australian professor emphasizes how his research published three years ago has been corroborated.

"The researchers also found that dysregulated platelets (cells involved in blood clotting) are linked to long Covid, something our research in an Australian cohort first suggested when it was published in 2021."

For Jeremy Nicholson, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Australian National Phenome Center at Murdoch University, it represents a formidable application of modern high-throughput proteomics to a current and important problem in medical science that affects millions of people around the world. : persistent covid.

As Nicholson points out to

SMCA

, "this article helps identify some fundamental immune alterations that help us understand the thromboinflammatory effects (affecting the lining of blood vessels, for example) that can lead to more widespread systemic problems (all "This work provides new insights into perturbations of complement proteins, but still does not explain the diversity of persistent Covid symptoms or their differential expression between individuals."

In fact, as the director of the Australian National Phenome Center continues, "the work revolves around proteomic data from a relatively small number of patients, so it is unlikely to be able to explain everything on its own."

There are also other (little known) factors in long Covid, "such as alteration of the microbiome in relation to gastrointestinal effects, which likely also influence immune regulation and control in their own right."

There are also known long-term alterations in energy metabolism and in the regulation of the tryptophan-serotonin pathway that are related to chronic fatigue, which is a common characteristic of persistent covid.

"No doubt these problems also have immunometabolic roots, but it is still unclear how they relate to these new findings. This paper is another brick in the wall, but the full integrative immunometabolic picture of long Covid is yet to emerge and requires further studies." even more exhaustive in a larger number of people," emphasizes Nicholson.