The changes discovered in this study may point to why some patients experience lasting inflammation and other long COVID symptoms many months after their initial infection has passed.
The small study, published inand funded by the National Institutes of Health, details how immune cells were analyzed through blood samples collected from 38 patients recovering from severe COVID and other critical illnesses, and from 19 healthy people.
These changes to patients' epigenetic landscapes were observed even a year after the initial COVID-19 infection. While the small participant pool meant that the research team could not establish a direct line between these innate changes and any ensuing health outcomes, the research provides us with clues as to why patients continue to struggle with inflammation and long COVID symptoms well after they recover.
"Ideally, the authors would have had cells from each patient before they got infected, as a comparator, to see what the epigenetic landscape was before COVID changed it," said Leitner."Clear links between the severity of COVID and genetics were discovered already early in the pandemic and this paper should prompt follow-up studies that link mutations in immune genes with the epigenetic changes described here.
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