Contents
Long COVID is a dangerous and unpleasant consequence of a recent coronavirus infection. Scientists still don’t know where it comes from, and the list of possible symptoms isn’t closed yet. However, we have a breakthrough in terms of diagnostics. Researchers have found that performing a test early in an infection can determine if a person is at risk of serious illness in the future.
- According to scientists, long COVID can be predicted at an early stage of coronavirus infection
- The condition is, however, to undergo a simple examination – scalp biopsy
- Such a sample may show significant changes in blood vessels that may be related to long COVID
- More current information can be found on the Onet homepage.
A simple skin biopsy will detect changes in those infected with COVID-19
Weill Cornell Medicine specialists say that with the help of a simple test, you can assess the scale of damage caused to the body by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Previously, they emphasize, much more complex biopsies of nervous tissue, kidneys and lungs were needed.
“We are the first group to notice that the lung disease associated with COVID-19 is different from other severe respiratory infections and that these atypical pathologies are systemic,” says Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, one of the authors of the paper published in The American Journal of Pathology ».
Doctors in his team took 4 mm sections of normal-looking skin from 15 patients treated in the intensive care unit for COVID-19 and 6 patients with mild to moderate disease. They also looked at samples taken from 9 people who died before the pandemic who had severe kidney or lung disease.
They found microclots in 13 out of 15 patients with severe COVID-19. They were not detectable in people with mild or moderate disease or those who died before the pandemic. Probably, then, microscopic changes in the vessels are a characteristic feature of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
In turn, the researchers found the antiviral protein MxA in all volunteers who experienced the infection more mildly, which indicated that the immune system was actively fighting the infection. Among patients with severe COVID-19, only two people had such a protein.
Significant changes in people with long COVID. You can see them in the vessels of the skin
At the same time, the pro-inflammatory protein SIN19A was present in large amounts in the skin vessels of seriously ill patients with COVID-3.
It is possible that it is related to the so-called a cytokine storm that sometimes accompanies SARS-CoV2 infection.
The results described may have practical clinical applications. Scientists also point out that further, more detailed research will be needed before the possible introduction of new procedures.
However, they emphasize that a simple skin biopsy could possibly provide a good assessment of a patient with COVID-19.
«If the results can be confirmed in a longitudinal cohort study, early identification of factors associated with severe COVID-19 with a simple skin biopsy performed in the early stage of SARS-CoV-2 infection could help detect people at risk of acute disease and long-term COVIDEM and enable early introduction of appropriate measures »- emphasizes the expert.
Have you been infected with COVID-19? Be sure to check your health. The Healing Blood Test Pack, available on Medonet Market, can help you with this. You can also make them at home.
We encourage you to listen to the latest episode of the RESET podcast. This time, Dr. Agnieszka Bolikowska – the founder of Linguistics, creator of the 6oMethod® method, will tell us about what slow learning is. How to break the language barrier? How to learn to make mistakes? You will learn about this and other aspects of language learning in today’s episode. Listen!