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The work can also provide “peace of mind for some of the long-haul commuters,” says Mukherjee. As a long-time survivor of COVID, she understands that when patients don’t know the cause of their suffering, it can add to their anxiety. They wonder, “What the hell is wrong with me?” she said.
With more than 200 documented symptoms that can mix into seemingly endless concoctions, long-term COVID is a particularly difficult disease to crack. (SN: 6/12/24). “Teasing out the mechanisms that lead to these symptoms has been the real challenge,” says Mukherjee.
Some data so far have shown autoantibodies. These can increase in the blood during a SARS-CoV-2 infection, but their levels often decrease as a person recovers. However, in people with long-standing COVID, scientists have shown that autoantibodies can persist long after the initial illness has passed.
But research so far has not revealed “whether these autoantibodies are merely bystanders or active contributors to long-term symptoms of COVID,” wrote bioRxiv.org study co-author Hung-Jen Chen of the University of Amsterdam Medical Center and colleagues.
“Teasing out the mechanisms that lead to these symptoms has been the real challenge.”Manali Mukherjee, translational immunologist
Working independently, Chen’s team and immunologist Akiko Iwasaki’s group at Yale University each collected antibodies from dozens of people with and without chronic COVID, injected those antibodies into mice, and then tested the animals’ behaviors.
Antibodies that came from patients who reported dizziness caused a noticeable loss of balance in the mice, Iwasaki found. And both groups found that long-acting COVID antibodies can make mice more sensitive to pain. In an experiment by Iwasaki’s group that tested the animals’ ability to tolerate standing on a hot plate, mice that received antibodies from COVID-19 patients showed signs of pain after about seven seconds, compared to about 10 seconds in mice that received the antibodies. from healthy people. .
Those mice that became hypersensitive to pain had mostly received antibodies from patients who had chronic pain, Iwasaki’s group reported. This increased sensitivity may be due to antibody attacks that damage the nerves. After the injection, the mice developed damaged nerve fibers in the skin.
Scientists have proposed many hypotheses for what causes long-lasting COVID, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in tissues and the reawakening of dormant herpes viruses. (SN: 3/4/24). These elements may still play a role in some people’s lingering COVID symptoms, but for pain, at least, the rogue antibodies appear to be sufficient to initiate the symptom itself. It is not an exceptional role for autoantibodies; Scientists suspect they may also be involved in other conditions that cause pain in humans, including fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
But if doctors could identify which long-term COVID patients have pain-related autoantibodies, they could try to reduce the amount circulating in the blood, says Iwasaki, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “I think it would really be a game changer for this particular group of patients.”
The work represents a “very strong level of evidence” that autoantibodies can cause harm in people with long-standing COVID, says Ignacio Sanz, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta. Both he and Mukherjee would like the findings to be validated in larger groups of participants. And the real solution, Sanz says, would come from long-term studies. If scientists can show that patients’ symptoms ease as these rogue antibodies disappear over time, that would be an even surer sign of their guilt.
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