Long Covid victim discusses daily impact of virus
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Most infections with Covid normally resolve within the first four weeks. Long Covid is a term that is commonly used to describe signs and symptoms which continue or develop after an acute infection. Some leading health professionals have proposed that an autoimmune mechanism triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein might explain both Long Covid symptoms and some rare vaccine side effects.
Long Covid affects roughly five to 30 percent of those infected by COVID-19.
Researchers are studying several ideas about the underlying biology.
Some studies have found the virus may in certain cases linger in a person’s tissues and cause ongoing damage.
Other evidence indicates aftereffects of the original infection might play a role even after the body clears the virus.
One study done on animals supports the idea that antibodies targeting the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—the same protein that many vaccines use to trigger a protective immune response—might cause collateral damage, notes Harald Prüss, a neurologist at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the Charité University Hospital in Berlin.
In 2020, while hunting for antibody therapies for COVID-19, he and his colleagues discovered that of 18 antibodies they identified with potent effects against SARS-CoV-2, four also targeted healthy tissues in mice.
A potential warning sign they could trigger autoimmune problems.
Some researchers are looking at another possible cause for Long Covid which includes tiny clots in the blood.
In an acute COVID-19 infection, small clots can form that can damage cells that line blood vessels.
Resia Pretorius, a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and her colleagues published preliminary evidence in August in Cardiovascular Diabetology that microscopic clots can linger after an infection clears.
It was found that they might interfere with oxygen delivery, which could explain some Long Covid symptoms including brain fog.
Pretorius is now teaming up with colleagues to develop diagnostics for this micro clotting and study ways to treat it in Long Covid.
Pretorius also noted some patients, fewer than 20, with similar chronic problems following vaccination.
She says these include Long Covid–like symptoms such as brain fog as well as other clotting concerns such as deep vein thrombosis.
The cause of the very rare but severe clotting after the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines remains unknown.
Pretorius suspects all COVID-19 vaccines might also sometimes trigger subtler clotting issues.
She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to micro clots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations.
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