The novelcorona virus is indeed new to researchers and experts, that it is taking long for them to crack the crux about the infection. It seems similar to opening or unrevealing a pandora box. However, one of many unknown facts of long Covid is the question about who is prone to developing it!
Recently, a team of researchers, who studied over 200 patients for two to three months after their COVID diagnoses report, have identified biological factors that might support to identify if a person will develop long Covid.
The study, published Tuesday 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.
One of the four factors researchers identified is the level of coronavirus RNA in the blood early in the infection, an indicator of viral load. Another is the presence of certain autoantibodies — antibodies that mistakenly attack tissues in the body as they do in conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. A third factor is the reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus, a virus that infects most people, often when they are young, and then usually becomes dormant. While, the final factor is a case of Type 2 diabetes.
According to the study, the most influential factor appeared to be autoantibodies, which were associated with two-thirds of the cases of long Covid.
Earlier, the findings from a research from University of Hong Kong published online in the journal Gut, showed that 81 bacterial species were associated with different categories of long Covid and many species were associated with more than two categories of persistent symptoms.
Long Covid was reported in 86 of these patients at three months and in 81 at six months. The most common symptoms at 6 months were fatigue (31 per cent), poor memory (28 per cent), hair loss (22 per cent), anxiety (21 per cent), and sleep disturbances (21 per cent). "This is an observational study, and as such can't establish the cause," the researchers said.
(with agency inputs)
