A research team has discovered that there is a unique pattern of blood plasma proteins who have suffered from covid for a longer period of time. This conclusion is derived after using advanced research techniques by the team of researchers. According to current data, approx 10%-20% of people have suffered from a long covid period among the total number of covid patients.
According to Dr Douglas Fraser who is a professor in the paediatrics department at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and a physician at London Health Sciences Center (LHSC) as stated that patients who have suffered from long covid are prone to a wide variety of symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and difficulty breathing and it is very important to diagnose the disorder and identify the required treatment as early as possible. The need is to enhance and alter their quality of life.
A protein is found in blood plasma that is released by cells and is called “the plasma proteome”. It has an important role in developing the immune system to resist viruses. The adaptation of these proteins in long covid patients is under study and observation by a team of researchers.
For the study samples of blood plasma were collected from the patients who suffered from covid for a longer period. The study was conducted through the Post-Acute COVID-19 Program at St. Joseph’s and compared a group of healthy patients to acutely ill Covid-19 patients at LHSC.
“We used novel technologies for this study, allowing us to analyse more than 3,000 proteins in blood plasma at the same time with multiple patients,” says Cristiana Iosef, research analyst at Children’s Health Research Institute (CHRI), a Lawson program. The proteins were then analysed using a unique bioinformatic pipeline, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to identify the precise alterations that take place in lengthy COVID.
With the help of the latest technologies, researchers are able to study the unique patterns in blood proteins. The discovery associated with the study mentioned that there is prolonged inflammation along with changes in immune cells and blood vessels that can lead to problems in specific organs like the brain and the heart.
According to Dr. Michael Knauer, an associate scientist at Lawson, “the saved blood plasma samples we are using helped us determine the long-term responses to COVID-19; serial blood plasma samples from individuals that had a COVID-19 infection and are currently thought to have long COVID will help us determine how proteins are changing over time.”
The protein discovered could prove to be a potential drug target and new drug therapies and it can improve outcomes in patients.