WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) – The bacteria in your gut may play a role in the severity of COVID-19 infection and the strength of your immune system response, a new study indicates.
Not only that, imbalances in the microbiome can cause persistent inflammatory symptoms, often referred to as “long-distance” COVID, the researchers added.
“Imbalance in the microbiome contributes to the severity of COVID-19, and if it persists after viral clearance, it can contribute to persistent symptoms and multi-system inflammatory syndromes such as long-term COVID syndrome,” said lead researcher Dr. Siew Ng, a professor at the Institute of Digestive Disease at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“Restoring the missing beneficial bacteria can increase our immunity to SARS-CoV2 virus and speed up the recovery from the disease,” she said. “The management of COVID-19 should not only be aimed at clearing the virus, but also at repairing the gut microbiota.”
However, the study could not prove that imbalances in the microbiome cause COVID-19 to be worse, but that there appears to be a link between the virus and bacteria in the gut, Ng said.
But evidence is growing that gut bacteria have been linked to inflammatory diseases, she noted.
For the study, the researchers studied blood and stool samples from 100 patients with COVID-19 and from 78 people without the infection who were part of a microbiome study before the pandemic began.
They found that the intestinal microbiome in 274 stool samples differed significantly between patients with and without COVID-19, regardless of whether they received drugs, including antibiotics.
For example, those with COVID-19 had fewer types of bacteria that could affect the immune system’s response than those without the infection. The reduced number of these bacteria was linked to the severity of the infection.
In addition, the number of bacteria remained low until 30 days after the infected patients removed the virus, the researchers found.
COVID-19 causes the immune system to make inflammatory cytokines, and in some cases, this reaction can be excessive and cause widespread tissue damage, septic shock, and organ failure.
Analysis of the blood samples found that the microbial imbalance in the COVID-19 patients was linked to high levels of inflammatory cytokines and blood marks from tissue damage, such as C-reactive proteins.