Possible biomarker for long COVID suggests some people with the condition never fully cleared the virus
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. 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 intact spike protein found in patients’ blood could indicate that infected cells missed by the immune system are to blame for long COVID. “Our main hypothesis is that [the spike protein is] not causing the symptoms, but it’s just a marker that is released because you still have infection of some cells with SARS-CoV-2,” says study co-author Zoe Swank, a research scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
This hypothesis lines up with other evidence that COVID infects more parts of the body than just the lungs, including studies that have found SARS-CoV-2 in deceased patients’ organs. This preprint study doesn’t rule out other possible causes of long COVID, however, particularly because not all of the long COVID sufferers had the spike protein in their blood.
“This study, to me, is potentially a game changer, if it’s confirmed,” says infectious disease physician-scientist Michael Peluso of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “One of the major obstacles to designing and implementing studies of treatments for long COVID is that, while we can ask people how they feel, there has not so far been a clear, objective marker that is measurable in the blood of people experiencing long COVID.
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