New research hints at 4 factors that may increase chances of Long Covid

It is one of many mysteries about Long Covid: Who is more prone to developing it? Are some people more likely than others to experience physical, neurological or cognitive symptoms that can emerge, or linger for, months after their coronavirus infections have cleared?

Now, a team of researchers who followed more than 200 patients for two to three months after their Covid diagnoses report that they have identified biological factors that might help predict if a person will develop long Covid.

The study, published by the journal Cell, found four factors that could be identified early in a person’s coronavirus infection that appeared to correlate with increased risk of having lasting symptoms weeks later:

1. The level of coronavirus RNA in the blood early in the infection, an indicator of viral load.
2. The presence of certain autoantibodies — antibodies that mistakenly attack tissues in the body as they do in conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
3. The reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus, a virus that infects most people, often when they are young, and then usually becomes dormant.
4. Having Type 2 diabetes, although the researchers and other experts said that in studies involving larger numbers of patients, it might turn out that diabetes is only one of several medical conditions that increase the risk of Long Covid.

The researchers said they had found that there was an association between these factors and Long Covid whether the initial infection was serious or mild. They said that the findings might suggest ways to prevent or treat some cases of Long Covid, including the possibility of giving people antiviral medications soon after an infection has been diagnosed.

“I think this research stresses the importance of doing measurements early in the disease course to figure out how to treat patients, even if we don’t really know how we’re going to use all that information yet,” said Jim Heath, the principal investigator of the study.

However, the study authors and other experts cautioned that the findings were exploratory and would need to be verified by considerably more research.

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Source: The New York Times, 25 January 2022