Research from Irish immunologists could result in breakthrough treatments for long COVID, according to Professor Luke O’Neill.
While COVID and the pandemic feels like a distant memory, for many people it continues to be a day-to-day problem.
This is particularly true for people with long COVID, a “debilitating but very common” condition that still has no treatment.
Prof O’Neill told Show Me the Science a recent study with 236,000 people found a third of those who get COVID might develop the long-term disease.
“It’s when the infection is gone but the symptoms linger,” he said. “Mainly to do with the brain: fatigue and brain fog.
“Some cannot get out of bed, that’s how severe it is, others can go about their day but they're a bit tired.”
A cause of long COVID?
For a long time, knowledge about long COVID was rare, making the potential to prevent or treat it even rarer.
In recent weeks, however, Irish scientists discovered “disruption to the integrity of the blood vessels” in brains of patients with long COVID and brain fog.
The blood vessel “leakiness” was not found in people with the condition but no brain fog.
Prof O’Neill explained that your brain needs nutrients and oxygen like other parts of the body, but the blood vessels in the brain must be much tighter to prevent leaks.
Using special imaging with dye in the brain, however, the Irish scientists discovered the blood vessels became leaky in some COVID patients.
'A step in the right direction'
Prof O’Neill said this discovery is a “good starting point” to diagnose and treat the disease.
“A biomarker tells us what is going wrong in a disease,” he said. “This leaky blood brain barrier could be a biomarker for long COVID.
“All the big drug companies would have seen the paper – they'll all read it and think this is interesting, this could be used to treat the disease.
“There’s a massive need here and the drug companies want to make money.”
While acknowledging there are challenges to the research still, and this study may prove to only reveal a correlation rather than a cause of long COVID, Prof O’Neill argued this research is a “step in the right direction”.
