BarcelonaThe ongoing Covid disease is still a mystery. Vaccines and antiviral treatments have greatly improved the management of a wide range of symptoms (up to 200) associated with this condition that began affecting Covid-19 patients in early 2020, such as fatigue, mental fog and memory loss. But there are still complications whose cause we don’t know, such as sudden difficulty breathing. In a study, researchers from the University of Virginia in the US have discovered a protein that may play a key role in understanding the symptoms of ongoing Covid in the lungs. According to the results of the work published in the journal Translational medical sciences, This molecule, called interferon gamma, can cause abnormal immune responses, contributing to lung inflammation and fibrosis after infection.
According to the authors, there are more than 60 million people with persistent or recurring symptoms of the disease. In Catalonia, it is not known how many people have persistent Covid, although the vast majority of cases are linked to the first wave of the pandemic. 14,000 have appeared in the records, but the number is expected to be higher. Those affected tend to have a debilitating cough, lung disease and difficulty breathing. The authors compared lung tissue cells from people with and without coronavirus through a technique called bronchial lavage – where a bronchoscope is passed through the mouth or nose into the lungs and a measured amount of saline is introduced to allow the airways to be examined – and they were able to observe “anomalous relationships” between a type of white blood cell and a type of immune cell. They also saw that the “mediator” of these interactions was gamma interferon, a molecule that had already been identified two years ago as a key element in understanding why some people become seriously ill while others overcome the infection without symptoms.
In parallel, the researchers verified this finding in mice, testing an interferon-gamma antibody treatment to see if it improved the animals’ immune response. They were able to reduce inflammation and fibrosis in the rodents once they had recovered from acute COVID-19. For this reason, they believe these protein inhibitors should be evaluated as a potential treatment for persistent COVID-19 symptoms. Until a treatment arrives, only a minority of chronic COVID-19 patients (7.6%) recover two years after infection.
Beyond the blood
So far, most studies aimed at unraveling the ongoing coronavirus tangle have analyzed blood samples from patients, rather than samples of infected tissue. As a result of this research, there is a growing body of evidence linking the symptoms of this disease to a dysregulation of the immune response in patients. However, the researchers found it necessary to also examine samples derived from infected tissue, in this case the lungs, because it is a respiratory disease. In addition, they caution that clinical studies often provide only correlational knowledge, but not causal mechanisms, so, beyond blood, it is necessary to investigate other aspects related to the disease.
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