If you do contract COVID, a simple blood test can find out whether you are more likely to develop a long-term covid or post-covid infection.
For the study, which is published in the Lancet eBiomedicine journal, blood samples were collected from healthcare workers who have contracted COVID and later, they were compared with blood samples from healthcare workers. who were not infected.
Normally the level of protein in the body remains stable. But there is a dramatic difference in the levels of some proteins up to six weeks after infection. This suggests a disruption in several important biological processes.
The researchers later used artificial intelligence to find a signature in the abundance of different proteins that successfully predicted whether a person would report persistent symptoms a year after infection.
Lead author of the study Dr. Gaby Kaptur (MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Aging at UCL) said, “Our study shows that even mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 disrupts the profile of proteins in our blood plasma. This means that even mild COVID-19 can dramatically affect normal biological processes for at least six weeks after infection.
“Our tool for predicting long-term covid still needs to be validated in an independent, larger cohort of patients. However, using our approach, a test that predicts long covid at the time of initial infection , it can be started in a quick and cost effective manner.
“The method of analysis we used is readily available in hospitals and is high-throughput, meaning it can analyze thousands of samples in an afternoon.”
Senior author Dr Wendy Heywood (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital) said, “If we can identify people who are more likely to develop Covid over a longer period of time, it would be an antidote to this. Trials like -viral opens the door to treatment. First, the initial infection stage, to see if it can reduce the risk of COVID in the long term later.”
For the study, researchers analyzed blood plasma samples from 54 healthcare workers who had PCR, or antibody-confirmed infection, taken every week in spring 2020 for six weeks, comparing them to 102 healthcare workers with the same period from samples taken that were not infected. ,
(with inputs from agencies)
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