A new track is emerging to explain the long Covid. New work carried out by Inserm research teams from Paris-Cité University in collaboration with the University of Minho in Braga (Portugal), has just shown that the long Covid could be explained biologically.
Jérôme Estaquier, author of this work, explains to Lucie Bouteloup the main conclusions of this study carried out on more than 120 people: “ We were able to observe, after six months of infection, that in people in whom we could detect long forms, we were able to identify biomarkers that were present in the blood of these people. »
” A deficiency of immune defense »
“ The other point that we could observe, continues Jérôme Estaquier, it is that retrospectively, these long forms were rather associated with people who had had more serious forms, therefore had a greater immune defense deficit and therefore which could suggest that at the start of the infection, the more the damage was important, the more the virus could therefore circulate, in particular at the level of the intestine, in any case of the gastroenteritis system and in which in fact, viral or parasitic infections can persist. »
“ Furthermore, these biomarkers therefore open up new perspectives both in the follow-up of patients, but also open up prospects for their management, in particular through the use perhaps of antiretrovirals or antivirals which would effectively allow the elimination of this residual virus, and therefore to perhaps reduce the forms or the consequences of this viral persistence concludes the researcher.
One or more symptoms
Fatigue, cough, shortness of breath, intermittent fever, loss of taste or smell, difficulty concentrating, depression… the long Covid is manifested, according to the WHO, by one or more symptoms, generally within three months after the infection, persisting for at least two months and not explained by any other diagnosis, writes AFP. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, said in late April 2023 that one in ten infections results in long Covid, suggesting that hundreds of millions of people could require long-term care.
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