![]() ![]() The intact spike protein found in patients’ blood could indicate that infected cells missed by the immune system are to blame for long COVID. The presence and intensity of the change can be used to tell both that the sought-after protein is present and how much of it there is. The beads light up when they come into contact with the specific protein that binds to the antibody in their coating. The samples were taken two or more times over the course of a year since the patients’ original COVID infection and compared with plasma from a control group of 26 people who had fully recovered from the disease. They added microscopic beads covered in antibodies to blood plasma from 37 people who had been diagnosed with long COVID. The researchers searched for the spike protein by using a technique designed for identifying individual proteins. The findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. During an initial COVID infection, the spike protein typically breaks off into smaller pieces when it penetrates human cells, but the spike proteins observed in this study were still in one piece. The fragment is a spike protein, one of the protrusions around the outside of SARS-CoV-2 that give this coronavirus its namesake corona, or crownlike appearance. In a preprint paper uploaded to medRxiv in June, researchers reported detecting a fragment of SARS-CoV-2 in blood samples from long COVID sufferers up to a year after their original infection. Now researchers may have found a marker for the disabling condition: a piece of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, floating around in the blood of some long COVID sufferers well after their initial infection. Part of the difficulty is that there isn’t yet a way to measure biological signals of long COVID infections in the body to start the process of testing new treatments. ![]() Doctors can diagnose long COVID by speaking to their patients about their experiences before and after an initial COVID infection, but researchers still haven’t pinned down what causes the condition or how to treat it. The now infamous condition long COVID presents as a wide range of symptoms-everything from persistent chest pains to rashes, pins and needles, and brain fog. ![]()
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