As access to COVID-19 vaccination is expanding across the country, some people suffering from long COVID, also known as long-distance riders, have reported relief after receiving their vaccination. Now researchers are trying to understand whether a vaccine can help people with long-term symptoms – and why.
Solving this mystery could unlock the secrets of long COVID and even suggest therapies for a number of similar elusive conditions.
With nearly 30 million cases of coronavirus across the country, long COVID has emerged as an increasingly urgent matter.
“Even though we are able to limit the spread of the virus, there are already millions of people with long-term symptoms,” said Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale immunologist, said.
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Dr. Jennifer Frontera, a neurologist at New York University who has been studying COVID for a long time, agrees that the number of long-distance transportation is probably ‘in the order of millions’.
Last year, Iwasaki suggested several possible causes of long COVID, which she says can now explain why a vaccine can help.
According to one theory, long COVID can be the result of a prolonged viral infection or of viral fragments in the body, which can cause the vaccine to destroy the body, Iwasaki said.
“Once you do that, you cure the symptoms by eliminating the source of the problem,” she said.
But another theory claims that long COVID is an autoimmune reaction, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own cells, Iwasaki said. If this is the case, the immune response caused by the vaccine can infer immune cells that have attacked the body cells.
“It does not exclude each other,” Iwasaki said. “A person may have a persistent virus and autoimmunity.”
Some scientists, such as the immunologist dr. Nancy Klimas, wonders if long COVID is caused by old viruses that stay in the body but are usually kept in check, such as infectious mononucleosis. She speculates that COVID damages the immune system and releases these viruses. The vaccine can then “restore a normal antiviral response, so that long transport can effectively prevent latent viruses from reactivating,” Klimas said.
Other experts, such as Frontera, suggest that it is best to understand why COVID happens long before you think about how a vaccine can help.
“Once we understand this, you might try to make a hypothesis about the response of an antibody or T cell to a vaccine that can improve long-term COVID symptoms,” Frontera said.
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Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, emphasized that the only way to know if a vaccine helps relieve long-term symptoms is to design a controlled study so that the person does not know if he or she is getting the vaccine. or not. ‘This is to exclude what is called a placebo effect.
Frontera has a placebo effect possible, and in general many sick people start to feel better after receiving any treatment, even if there is no biological reason why it would help.
While no one can currently say whether or how the COVID-19 vaccine will relieve, experts agree that long-term carriers should get the vaccine if possible.
“My advice to long-term carriers is not to get the vaccine, but because it has to happen anyway, and if they get it as a bonus, I want to know,” Klimas said.
“There are many reasons why people want to get the vaccine,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, who does research on the outcomes at Yale, said. “And on top of that, it’s the added thing that some people seem to be getting better at.”
Experts also agree that more research is critical.
“Determining the cause of these long-term symptoms will really help the patients with regards to everything: diagnosis, treatment and prognosis,” Iwasaki said.
“We are looking at the serum of tall COVID patients to see if we can find auto-reactive antibodies and T cells,” Iwasaki added. “We also plan to look at the responses of long COVID people who get the vaccine to see what kind of immunity they get.”
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Meanwhile, Frontera investigated how many COVID patients develop long-term symptoms and whether they experience relief after vaccination. She stressed the importance of people participating in research.
“Please participate in clinical trials that you are eligible for,” she said. “We all need to help get to the heart of this.”
Investigating long COVID and how the vaccine affects it can have far-reaching consequences.
“If the vaccine stimulates the antiviral response in a non-specific way, it will be very good for many patients, not only long-range devices, but also cancer patients and people whose immune systems have been fed in some way,” Klimas said. said. .
Krumholz added: “If you understand it, it could unlock the secret to treating other post-viral conditions or other autoimmune or viral mediated conditions so that it can help science in a way beyond the pandemic.”
Maia Ou, MD, a general practitioner in psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital at Northwell Health, is contributing to the ABC News Medical Unit.
Experts weigh in on how COVID vaccines can help long-term carriers, which originally appeared on abcnews.go.com