UCSF Magazine: What’s New in the Search for a Long COVID Cure?

[SNT Gatchaman]

What’s New in the Search for a Long COVID Cure?
Effective therapies that target the condition’s root causes could be a few years away.

Interviewing Michael Peluso, most recently author of Reduced exercise capacity, chronotropic incompetence, and early systemic inflammation in cardiopulmonary phenotype Long COVID (2023)

Is long COVID primarily a neurological disease?

Maybe. The nervous system could be responsible for a lot of long COVID symptoms, and neurological symptoms seem to be the ones that are talked about the most. Brain fog is one of the most significant and debilitating symptoms in some people. Since the beginning, we at LIINC have worked closely with other UCSF researchers who are specifically investigating brain fog. But there are many people with long COVID who do not have neurological symptoms. It seems that many different organ systems might be involved.

What are you learning about the underlying mechanisms of long COVID?

We’ve also been interested in the relationship between long COVID and prior Epstein-Barr infection, because people with reactivation of that infection appear twice as likely to report having long COVID. And, interestingly, they seem to be more likely to have brain fog symptoms.

The hottest topic now is viral persistence. We suspect that inflammation can be driven by pieces of viral protein lingering in the body. We recently published a paper on people with brain fog or new depression or anxiety symptoms after COVID. It found they had COVID proteins in their blood months after they got COVID. That was a very surprising observation, because the virus that causes COVID is not supposed to persist. We are planning follow-up studies on this topic now.