Long and Post Covid are still a mystery as complications of a Sars-CoV-2 infection. Researchers have now taken a big step forward by examining certain proteins in the blood for early detection.
A team of researchers has managed to identify 20 proteins in the blood of Sars-CoV-2 infected people that may be able to reliably make a long-Covid prediction. According to Gabriella Captur and her colleagues from University College London, this prediction can already be made at the beginning of the infection with Sars-CoV-2, the researchers write about their results, which were published in the journal “The Lancet”.
For the study, they accessed blood samples from a total of 156 British nurses. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, they were already obliged to have their blood drawn and tested weekly. The average age of the subjects was 39 years. 54 of these test persons were found to be infected with Sars-CoV-2 within the investigation period. 44 percent of them are male. The 102 other individuals served as a control group. Of these, 38 percent are male.
The research team took a closer look at a total of 91 blood proteins in the blood of all study participants. In this way, it wanted to find out whether these change in the course of a Covid-19 disease and, if so, how. So-called mass spectrometry was used for the investigations, a form of analysis that reacts extremely sensitively to tiny changes in the amount of protein in the blood plasma. It was thus possible to determine how a Sars-CoV-2 infection affected these proteins over a period of six weeks.
Normally the protein levels in the blood are stable. But the researchers saw dramatic differences in some proteins up to six weeks after Sars-CoV-2 infection. These changes are strong evidence that a number of important biological processes are disrupted. “Our study shows that even mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 disrupts the profile of proteins in blood plasma. This means that even mild Covid-19 can dramatically affect normal biological processes up to at least six weeks after infection,” Captur says in a statement according to the university.
The researchers saw significantly changed values ??for 12 of the 91 proteins examined at the beginning of the corona infection. As the disease progressed, seven more were added. It was also noticeable that the larger the anomalies were, the more severe the symptoms were in the Covid 19 patients. The 20 identified proteins, which already showed changes at the beginning of the infection, are an indication of whether post-Covid can still be expected after a year. Most of the identified proteins have been implicated in anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory processes.
In a further step, the researchers fed an artificial intelligence (AI) with the existing data. The machine learning algorithm was able to identify all 11 healthcare professionals who were still complaining of at least one post-Covid symptom a year after their Sars-CoV-2 infection. “Our tool for predicting post-Covid has yet to be verified in an independent, larger group of patients. However, with our approach, a test could be introduced quickly and inexpensively that predicts post-Covid at the time of initial infection,” summarizes Captur.
With this knowledge, those affected could be treated with appropriate means at the beginning of the infection in order to possibly prevent post-Covid. However, further studies must first show whether this is really possible.
