Long COVID shows evidence of immunological dysfunction persisting even 8 months after acute recovery.

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• Chansavath Phetsouphanh, David R Darley, Daniel B Wilson, Annett Howe, C Mee Ling Munier, Sheila K Patel, Jennifer A Juno, Louise M Burrell, Stephen J Kent, Gregory J Dore, Anthony D Kelleher, and Gail V Matthews.
• The Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. cphetsouphanh@kirby.unsw.edu.au.
• Nat. Immunol. 2022 Jan 13.

AbstractA proportion of patients surviving acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection develop post-acute COVID syndrome (long COVID (LC)) lasting longer than 12 weeks. Here, we studied individuals with LC compared to age- and gender-matched recovered individuals without LC, unexposed donors and individuals infected with other coronaviruses. Patients with LC had highly activated innate immune cells, lacked naive T and B cells and showed elevated expression of type I IFN (IFN-β) and type III IFN (IFN-λ1) that remained persistently high at 8 months after infection. Using a log-linear classification model, we defined an optimal set of analytes that had the strongest association with LC among the 28 analytes measured. Combinations of the inflammatory mediators IFN-β, PTX3, IFN-γ, IFN-λ2/3 and IL-6 associated with LC with 78.5-81.6% accuracy. This work defines immunological parameters associated with LC and suggests future opportunities for prevention and treatment.© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.

This article appears in the collection: What is Long COVID?.

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