Back

Plasma cytokine levels reveal deficiencies in IL-8 and gamma interferon in Long-COVID

Williams, E. S. C. P.; Martins, T. B.; Hill, H. R.; Coiras, M.; Shah, K. S.; Planelles, V.; Spivak, A. M.

2022-10-05 infectious diseases
10.1101/2022.10.03.22280661 medRxiv
Show abstract

Up to half of individuals who contract SARS-CoV-2 develop symptoms of long-COVID approximately three months after initial infection. These symptoms are highly variable, and the mechanisms inducing them are yet to be understood. We compared plasma cytokine levels from individuals with long-COVID to healthy individuals and found that those with long-COVID had 100% reductions in circulating levels of interferon gamma (IFN{gamma}) and interleukin-8 (IL-8). Additionally, we found significant reductions in levels of IL-6, IL-2, IL-17, IL-13, and IL-4 in individuals with long-COVID. We propose immune exhaustion as the driver of long-COVID, with the complete absence of IFN{gamma} and IL-8 preventing the lungs and other organs from healing after acute infection, and reducing the ability to fight off subsequent infections, both contributing to the myriad of symptoms suffered by those with long-COVID.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.