New imaging shows virus invading the body and lingering for years, potentially explaining Long COVID

Published December 7, 2024

Published by: The West Australian
Published on: December 8, 2024
By John Flint

Next time you think of dismissing COVID as just another annoying common cold it may pay to visualise what you see so starkly in this paper, the virus moving freely around your body and finding a long-term home in all sorts of places where it can really cause trouble, including the brain and the heart.

This work further emphasises the need for individuals, and societies as a whole to take this infection more seriously and try and reduce the amount of transmission using the tools we currently have, most especially vaccination, clean indoor air approaches and well-fitted masks in crowded and poorly ventilated indoor settings.

— Professor Brendan Crabb, director and CEO of the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health

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long COVID

Long COVID: SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Accumulation Linked to Long-Lasting Brain Effects

Published November 29, 2024

Published by: Helmholtz Munich
Published on: November 29, 2024

Researchers from Helmholtz Munich and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) have identified a mechanism that may explain the neurological symptoms of Long COVID. The study shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein remains in the brain’s protective layers, the meninges, and the skull’s bone marrow for up to four years after infection. This persistent presence of the spike protein could trigger chronic inflammation in affected individuals and increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. The team, led by Prof. Ali Ertürk, Director at the Institute for Intelligent Biotechnologies at Helmholtz Munich, also found that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce the accumulation of the spike protein in the brain. However, the persistence of spike protein after infection in the skull and meninges offers a target for new therapeutic strategies.

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‘Visionary’ study finds inflammation, evidence of Covid virus years after infection

Photo of cells infected with SARS-CoV-2. The reds and greens in the image represent cells infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Photo: Alberto Domingo Lopez-Munoz, Laboratory of Viral Diseases, NIAID/NIH.

long COVID

‘Visionary’ study finds inflammation, evidence of Covid virus years after infection

Published July 3, 2024

Published by: STAT
Published on: July 3, 2024
By Isabella Cueto

Remember when we thought Covid was a two-week illness? So does Michael Peluso, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

He recalls the rush to study acute Covid infection, and the crush of resulting papers. But Peluso, an HIV researcher, knew what his team excelled at: following people over the long term.

So they adapted their HIV research infrastructure to study Covid patients. The LIINC program, short for “Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus,” started in San Francisco at the very beginning of the pandemic. By April 2020, the team was already seeing patients come in with lingering illness and effects of Covid — in those early days still unnamed and unpublicized as long Covid. They planned to follow people’s progress for three months after they were infected with the virus.

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long COVID

Covid-19 Found in People’s Blood Months After Infection

Published April 26, 2024

Published by: Psychology Today
Published on: April 26, 2024
By Alison Escalante, M.D.

Key points

A quarter of people had Covid-19 viral proteins in their blood up to 14 months after infection.
These proteins in the blood indicate that SARS-CoV-2 keeps living in tissue reservoirs.
The study used a research-grade test that is not available outside of research labs.
The strongest evidence to date that Covid-19 persists in the body provides an important clue to Long Covid.

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The Netherlands

COVID Patient’s Infection Lasts Record 613 Days—and Accumulated Over 50 Mutations

Published April 18, 2024

Published by: Time
Published on: April 18, 2024
By Jason Gale / Bloomberg

A Covid-19 patient with a weakened immune system incubated a highly mutated novel strain over 613 days before succumbing to an underlying illness, researchers in the Netherlands found.

The patient, a 72-year-old man with a blood disorder, failed to mount a strong immune response to multiple Covid shots before catching the omicron variant in February 2022. Detailed analysis of specimens collected from more than two dozen nose and throat swabs found the coronavirus developed resistance to sotrovimab, a Covid antibody treatment, within a few weeks, scientists at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for Experimental and Molecular Medicine said. It later acquired over 50 mutations, including some that suggested an enhanced ability to evade immune defenses, they said.

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long COVID

Lessons in persistence

Published April 11, 2024

Published by: Science
Published on: April 11, 2024
By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

New Long Covid trials aim to clear lingering virus—and help patients in dire need.

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long COVID

Long COVID: The hunt for causes and cures

Published September 11, 2023

Published by: Chemical and Engineering News
Published on: September 11, 2023
By Shi En Kim

Hannah Davis misses her old self. Like so many people around the world, she has seen her life upended by long COVID, which has made many once-routine activities impossible. The 32-year-old has stopped working at her job in the field of machine learning and generative models. It’s too cognitively taxing; the lights from display monitors are disorienting. Merely standing up from a sitting position causes her heart rate to shoot to 170 beats per minute, the equivalent of doing a good jog.

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Tag: viral persistence