COVID-19 Virus May Prompt Body to Attack Itself
An international team of researchers studying COVID-19 has made a startling and pivotal discovery: The virus appears to cause the body to make weapons to attack its own tissues. The finding could unlock a number of COVID's clinical mysteries. They include the puzzling collection of symptoms that can come with the infection; the persistence of symptoms in some people for months after they clear the virus, a phenomenon dubbed long COVID; and why some children and adults have a serious inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-C or MIS-A, after their infections.
@gagan-deep The study comes on the heels of a handful of smaller, detailed investigations that have come to similar conclusions. The study included data from more than 300 patients from four hospitals: two in California, one in Pennsylvania, and another in Germany. Researchers used blood tests to study their immune responses as their infections progressed. Researchers looked for autoantibodies -- weapons of the immune system that go rogue and launch an attack against the body's own tissues. They compared these autoantibodies to those found in people who were not infected with the virus that causes COVID. As previous studies have found, autoantibodies were more common after COVID -- 50% of people hospitalized for their infections had autoantibodies, compared to less than 15% of those who were healthy and uninfected.