“Unlocking the Mystery of Long Covid: Study Reveals Why Some People Continue to Suffer”

2023-05-05 15:17:33

French-Portuguese researchers recently published a study regarding long Covid to determine why some people are more likely to suffer from symptoms over time.

If the global Covid-19 pandemic is only a bad memory for some, it is still very present in the daily lives of many people. Between 10 to 30% of cases still suffer from symptoms, months following contracting the disease.

This anomaly is the core subject of study by Professor Jérôme Estaquier and his team. The study, conducted by researchers from Inserm and researchers from the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, was carried out on 164 patients for six months. Of these, 127 had contracted the disease six months earlier and developed a long Covid. The 37 other people, who did not develop the disease, made up the control group.

The researchers were able to analyze blood samples from 72 patients taken during the acute phase of the disease. Thus, they “were able to retrospectively compare the level of inflammation at the early stage in people who subsequently developed a long Covid or not”.

The virus would hide in the mucous membranes

The study, published in Nature Communications, reveals that the long Covid mainly strikes people whose immune system is less efficient. Thus, these people would not be able to defend themselves properly once morest the virus and the latter would more easily manage to settle in areas where it can persist: in the mucous membranes.

The virus is first present in the pulmonary mucous membranes and “might therefore descend to the intestinal level and persist there without the immune system being able to eliminate it completely”. The intestinal mucosa “is more permissive than the others” explained Jérôme Estaquier to theExpress. “She is tuned to tolerate microbes that are used for digestion. So for a virus, it’s a real Trojan horse: it can stay there without being identified as a threat,” continued the Inserm researcher.

In addition, “a number of blood markers are present six months following infection in 70 to 80% of people with long Covid, while these same blood markers were rare in subjects who did not develop a long form”.

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