Rogue Antibodies May Cause Some Long Covid Symptoms

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two new studies suggest that antibodies that attack people's own tissues might cause ongoing neurological issues that afflict millions of people with the disease.

When scientists transferred theseantibodies from people with long COVIDinto healthy mice,certain symptoms, including pain, transferred to the animals too, researchers reported May 31 on bioRxiv.org and June 19 on medRxiv.org.

Though scientists havepreviously implicated such antibodies, known as autoantibodies, as suspects in long COVID, the new studies are the first to offer direct evidence that they can do harm.This is a big deal," says Manali Mukherjee, a translational immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved in the work. The papers make a good case for therapies that target autoantibodies, she says.

The work could also offerpeace of mind to some of the long-haulers," Mukherjee says. As someone who has endured long COVID herself, she understands that when patients don't know the cause of their suffering, it can add to their anxiety. They wonder, What the hell is going wrong with me?" she says.

[...] Scientists have proposedmany hypotheses for what causes long COVID, including SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in the tissues and the reawakening of dormant herpes viruses(SN: 3/4/24).Those elements may still play a role in some people's long COVID symptoms, but for pain, at least, rogue antibodies seem to be enough to kick-start the symptom all on their own. It's not an out-of-the-blue role for autoantibodies; scientists suspect they may also be involved in other conditions that cause people pain, including fibromyalgia andmyalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.

But if doctors could identify which long COVID patients have pain-linked autoantibodies, they could try to reduce the amount circulating in the blood, says Iwasaki, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. I think that would really be a game changer for this particular set of patients."

The work represents a very strong level of evidence" that autoantibodies could cause harm in people with long COVID, says Ignacio Sanz, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta. Both he and Mukherjee would like to see the findings validated in larger sets of participants. And the real clincher, Sanz says, would come from longer-term studies. If scientists could show that patients' symptoms ease as these rogue antibodies disappear over time, that'd be an even surer sign of their guilt.

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