A simple blood test could be started in 6 months: research

• Researchers are working on a simple blood test for “long-COVID.”
• The test could be ready in six months, they said.
• Long-haul COVID-19 have detectable “autoantibodies” that attack healthy cells, they found.
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Researchers are developing a simple blood test that could tell you if you are a COVID-19 long-haul.

The test could be ready within six months, they said.

The test works by looking for “autoantibodies”, which mistakenly attack cells in the body. Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, and his team have found these autoantibodies in the blood of people with ‘long COVID’, but not in people whose symptoms have gone away or who haven’t. had never caught the virus.

“I hope that within six months we will have a simple blood test that you can get from your GP [family doctor]”Altmann told the BBC.

Altmann said autoantibodies could be one of the causes of long-lasting symptoms of COVID, according to the BBC.

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The study was at an early stage and small, but could be scaled up, he said. There were other possible reasons why symptoms of COVID-19 persisted in some people, he said.

Dr Elaine Maxwell, a science adviser at the National Institute for Health Research, told the BBC the results were “exciting” but warned that the long COVID was a complex condition that needed more research.

A third of people who catch a coronavirus with symptoms develop long-term COVID, defined as at least one self-reported symptom lasting more than 12 weeks, according to UK data from June.

The June study estimated there were at least 2 million people with a long COVID in the UK alone. Chris Whitty, the UK’s chief medical adviser, warned on Wednesday that many young people could become long-haul COVID-19, as the country has recorded more than 27,000 new cases, mostly caused by the highly infectious Delta variant .

“It’s hard to escape a prediction that 100,000 new infections per day equals 10,000 to 20,000 long COVID cases per day, especially among young people. That’s a lot of damage for many lives,” Altmann said.