Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling
This is great news — clear, objective biomarkers for Long COVID, in a new Nature preprint. Hopefully this will put a nail in the coffin for the sorry cohort of LC deniers claiming that it’s “just anxiety” etc. @PutrinoLab on Twitter notes: Clear objective differences detectable “in the blood of folks with #LongCOVID when compared to people who did not have LC (some who had never had COVID as well as others who had COVID and fully recovered). These differences came down to three big areas: 1) Hormonal differences: namely extremely low morning cortisol in the LC group (cortisol is a hormone that does a lot of things, but in the morning its job is to wake you up and get your body ready to face the day. Low morning cortisol can affect your ability to do that). 2) Immune differences: namely evidence of T-cell exhaustion and increased B-cell activation in the LC group (this shows us an immune system that is fighting something off – and has been doing so for a while – persistent virus makes sense in this context). 3) Co-infection differences: namely evidence of latent viral reactivations in the LC group (if your immune system is weakened, opportunistic viruses will attack). There were NO differences in pre-existing history of depression or anxiety between the three groups and these objective biomarkers did not co-occur with any mental health sequelae that were measured.”
(tags: covid-19 diagnosis biomarkers long-covid putrino-lab akiko-iwasaki papers preprints nature medicine cortisol)