Severe COVID-19 can trigger autoimmune diseases; New variants cause more viruses in the air

September 22 (Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the results and that has not yet been certified by peer review.

Severe COVID-19 can ‘trigger’ immune self-attacks

Severe COVID-19 can trigger the immune system to produce so-called autoantibodies that have the potential to eventually attack healthy tissue and cause inflammatory disease, the researchers warned in an article published in Nature Communications. They found autoantibodies in blood samples from around 50% of the 147 COVID-19 patients they studied, but in less than 15% of the 41 healthy volunteers. For 48 COVID-19 patients, the researchers had blood samples taken on different days, including the day of hospital admission, allowing them to track the development of autoantibodies. “Within a week … about 20% of these patients had developed new antibodies against their own tissues that were not there on the day of their admission,” said study director Dr Paul Utz of the ‘Stanford University, in a press release. He urged people to get vaccinated. “You can’t know ahead of time that when you get COVID-19 it will be a mild case,” he said. “If you get a bad case, you could be setting yourself up for a life of trouble because the virus can trigger autoimmunity,” he said. “We haven’t studied the patients long enough to know if these autoantibodies are still there a year or two later,” he added, but noted that the development of an autoimmune disease was a possibility.

New variants can propagate more efficiently in the air

The virus that causes COVID-19 could improve for air travel, a new study suggests. The researchers found that patients infected with the Alpha variant of the virus – the dominant strain circulating when the study was conducted – put 43 to 100 times more virus in the air than people infected with the original version of the coronavirus. This was in part due to the fact that patients infected with Alpha exhibited increased amounts of the virus in nasal swabs and saliva. But the amount of virus exhaled was 18 times more than could be explained by the higher viral loads, according to a report in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The researchers also found that loose face coverings worn by patients with mild COVID-19 can reduce the amount of virus-charged particles in the surrounding air by about 50%. “We know that the Delta variant that is currently circulating is even more contagious than the Alpha variant,” co-author Don Milton of the University of Maryland School of Public Health said in a statement. “Our research indicates that the variants keep getting better for air travel, so we need to provide better ventilation and wear well-fitting masks, in addition to vaccination, to help stop the spread of the virus.”

Most cancer patients respond well to COVID-19 vaccines

People with cancer have appropriate protective immune responses to COVID-19 vaccines without experiencing more side effects than the general population, five separate research teams reported at the European Oncology meeting this week. In a study of 44,000 recipients of the two-dose Pfizer (PFE.N) / BioNTech vaccine, researchers found no difference in the side effects experienced by nearly 4,000 participants with past or current cancer . In a separate trial, researchers studied 791 cancer patients who received the two-dose Moderna vaccine (MRNA.O). 28 days after administration of the second dose, adequate levels of antibodies to the virus in the blood were found in 84% of cancer patients who received chemotherapy, in 89% of patients receiving combined chemotherapy immunotherapy drug and in 93% of patients receiving chemotherapy combined with an immunotherapy drug. of patients on immunotherapy alone. These results compare favorably with antibody responses seen in a distinct group of cancer-free individuals, according to European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) press officer Dr Antonio Passaro. “The high vaccine efficacy rates observed in the trial population, regardless of the type of cancer treatment, is a strong and reassuring message to patients and their physicians,” he said in a statement. .

Click for a Reuters graphic on vaccines in development.

Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot

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