Long COVID cause: Doctor explains three prevailing theories
- Long COVID affecting 25%-35% of previous COVID-19 patients
- Doctors have not been able to nail down cause of the symptoms
- Immunologist: Research probing inflammatory process
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(NewsNation) — Cases of long COVID are still perplexing medical professionals as they work to figure out what’s causing the prolonged symptoms
About 25% to 35% of people are estimated to have experienced some form of long COVID after recovering from a COVID-19 infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Purvi Parikh, an immunologist and long COVID specialist at NYU Langone in New York, explained Monday on “CUOMO” that there are three prevailing theories about a cause, all of which center around inflammation.
“There is some type of inflammatory process going on in the body for some individuals for months, even years, after they get sick and quote-unquote recover from COVID-19 that’s causing these symptoms,” Parikh said.
The possibilities being researched are that pieces of the virus are left behind in the body, it’s some sort of autoimmune disease or there are “sleeping” viruses that are getting reactivated.
“The thought is inflammation, and how we get there might be one of these three pathways, or a combination of them,” Parikh said.
New research emerged last week that might provide additional insights.
Published in Nature Communications, researchers from Amsterdam UMC and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam discovered the persistent fatigue in patients with long COVID has a biological cause: mitochondria in muscle cells that produce less energy than in healthy patients.
For the study, 25 long-COVID patients and 21 healthy participants were asked to ride a stationary bicycle for 15 minutes. Those with long COVID experienced long-term worsening of their symptoms.
The National Institutes of Health in August began a handful of studies to test possible treatments for the mysterious condition that afflicts millions.
Scientists don’t yet know what causes long COVID, the catchall term for about 200 widely varying symptoms.
Parikh worries that long COVID may be the next health pandemic on the horizon, and she hopes the government will invest more resources into studying it.
“I think our policymakers unfortunately are very shortsighted. So, unless there is a big fire in front of you like an active infection or economy shutting down, which might be the long-term consequence of this, those resources aren’t always concentrated that way,” she said. “People are studying it, but more needs to be done.”
NewsNation digital producer Sean Noone and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
