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Friday, March 29 2024
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Severe Covid can increase self-attacking antibodies: Study

Severe Covid can increase selfattacking antibodies Study
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New York: Severe Covid-19 patients are substantially more likely to harbour autoantibodies — antibodies directed at their own tissues or at substances their immune cells secrete into the blood — than people without Covid-19, according to a new study emphasising the need for vaccination..

Autoantibodies can be early harbingers of full-blown autoimmune disease.

“If you get severe Covid-19 to end up in the hospital, you may not be out of the woods even after you recover,” said PJ Utz, professor of immunology and rheumatology at the Stanford University in the US.

In the study published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’, the team looked for autoantibodies in blood samples drawn during March and April of 2020 from nearly 200 Covid-19 patients. Blood samples drawn from other donors prior to the Covid-19 pandemic were used as controls.

The researchers identified and measured levels of antibodies targeting the virus; autoantibodies; and antibodies directed against cytokines, proteins that immune cells secrete to communicate with one another and coordinate their overall strategy.

More than 60 per cent of all hospitalised Covid-19 patients carried anti-cytokine antibodies, the scientists found. And about 15 per cent of healthy controls.

This could be the result of immune-system overdrive triggered by a virulent, lingering infection. The abundance of cytokines trip off the production of antibodies targeting them, Utz said.

If any of these antibodies block a cytokine’s ability to bind to its appropriate receptor, the intended immune cell fails. That, in turn, might buy the virus more time to replicate and lead to a much worse outcome, the team explained.

The finding bolsters the argument for vaccination, he added. Vaccines for Covid-19 contain only a single protein — SARS-CoV-2’s so-called spike protein — or the genetic instructions for producing it. With vaccination, the immune system is safe from other novel viral proteins during infection.

In addition, vaccination is less intensely inflammatory than actual infection. Utz said there’s less likelihood that the immune system would generate antibodies.

“Some patients quickly mount appropriate antibody responses to the viral spike protein. They should be less likely to develop autoantibodies,” he said.

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