Professor Akiko Iwasaki and team just put out a pivotal paper showing that "passive transfer of IgG from patients with Long Covid into mice recapitulates increased pain and other symptoms." IgG stands for Immunoglobulin G; it's the most common type of antibody found in blood circulation. Without enough of them, you get more infections!
The paper is titled, "A causal link between autoantibodies and neurological symptoms in Long Covid." Last September, they started by looking at Long Covid sufferers with neurological symptoms, and compared their antibodies and autoantibodies with people recovering and with uninfected people. Autoantibodies are antibodies produced by the immune system that attack a person's own proteins and can cause autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, colitis...).
"Patients with Long Covid had a higher number of autoantibody reactivities than controls. Further, patients with Long Covid had more autoantibodies that reacted to diverse antigens expressed in the Central Nervous System tissues, as well as against common autoantigens associated with autoimmune diseases."
This time they looked at different phenotypes (observable physical properties) of patients to compare reports from the patients with Long Covid and mice behaviours after transferring IgG to healthy mice and comparing them to uninfected mice:
If mice got IgG from people reporting new-onset pain (pins and needles and burning pain), the mice had a significantly faster reaction time to stimuli, indicating greater pain sensitivity. Mice that got IgG from patients with tinnitus or headaches had significant drop in muscle strength. Mice that got IgG from patients reporting dizziness exhibited loss of balance and coordination.
They could SEE that the mice were experiencing physical symptoms similar to what the Long Covid patients were reporting.
They looked more at the pain phenotype and found that those mice showed a rapid reduction in intraepidermal nerve fibers (IENF), which is a marker for Small Fiber Neuropathy (SFN), which is a chronic condition marked by pain in hands and feet.
The good news, from Dr. Iwasaki:
"Altogether, our work demonstrates that patients with Long Covid have elevated autoantibodies that react to various neural tissues and when passively transferred are sufficient to recapitulate LC symptoms from the donors. These patients may benefit from antibody-reducing therapies. This work was inspired by the seminal studies in fibromyalgia, where the authors were able to passively transfer key symptoms with IgG from patients."
My takeaways from this...
1. Long Covid is NOT all in your head and neither is fibromyalgia. They found the thing that creates the symptoms so nobody can claim it's psychosomatic (if they're using the word to mean anything without a medical explanation). The mice exhibited the same flippin' physical experiences that patients had, so it's not because of anxiety or stress or childhood trauma.
2. Avoid getting a plasma donation if you can. Drive more carefully or something. Blood isn't being tested for Covid, and the Red Cross made a point of not making it safer to donate blood by being one of the first to ditch masks amid protests from many Covid cautious blood donors.
3. I wrote about people with Long Covid recovering significantly with HIV antiretrovirals in March: "So, because some people rushed to insist Covid is nothing like AIDS . . . this possibility took years to be tested." Now we have further proof that this is the route to take for treatment of Long Covid, which is amazing but so frustrating. Daniel Brittain Dugger has been screaming this for ages!
Co-author David Putrino added a disclaimer to the work:
"All mice were offered CBT to address their misguided illness beliefs and 'functional' disabilities, but it didn't work because they are mice, and this is real science."
But I'm sure some people are working hard to find ways long term effects of getting Covid are still not a real thing and maybe these mice were traumatized as pups. Maybe if the mice just exercised more they'd feel better. People will believe anything rather than acknowledge that we're living in a pandemic.
2 comments:
It's Canada Blood Services, not the Red Cross, but yeah, they were and are terrible about not providing Covid precautions. Despite what should have been learned from lack of HIV precautions back in the day.
You're right! It's been a while since the change, but I still call it the Red Cross from habit. And, yes, we already learned all this in with HIV a good forty years ago!
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