By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some of the latest scientific studies on the new coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Effects of long-lived COVID-19 observed in children
“Long COVID” – a term that refers to the effects of the virus that last for weeks or months – can be a problem for children too, suggests a small study. Doctors at a large Italian hospital tracked 129 children and adolescents with COVID-19 who were generally healthy. At an average of about five months after diagnosis, only about 42% had fully recovered. Approximately one in three young people still had one or two symptoms and more than one in five had three or more, according to a report published on medRxiv Tuesday before the peer review. The most common persistent problems were insomnia (reported by 18.6%), respiratory symptoms, including chest pain and tightness (14.7%), nasal congestion (12.4%), fatigue (10.8%), pain muscle (10.1%), joint pain (6.9%) and difficulties with concentration (10.1%). Although these problems were more common in children who were obviously sick, they also developed in infected young people with few or no symptoms at first. There is growing evidence that restrictive measures designed to contain the pandemic have a significant impact on children’s mental health, the researchers acknowledge. Still, their results suggest that the potential long-term effects that COVID-19 may have on children should be considered when developing measures to reduce the impact of the pandemic on their overall health. (https://bit.ly/3j8eITL)
Patients’ antibodies target the virus from various angles
Most treatments with antibodies and vaccines that target the coronavirus focus on stimulating an immune response against the spike protein it uses to divide itself into cells. Targeting other sites with the virus may also be a better approach, say the researchers. His study of COVID-19 survivors whose immune systems generated strong responses to the virus showed that more than half of these antibodies targeted other components of the virus besides the spike protein. The most common non-prickly targets for antibodies were the closed capsule in which the virus stores its genetic instructions and specific segments of those instructions, as excerpts from its RNA code. This suggests that antibodies unrelated to the peak may play a significant role in eliminating the virus, the research team said in an article published on Thursday in bioRxiv before the peer review. In terms of natural immunity, it also suggests that, when faced with new variants of the spike protein, the immune system will have other locations in the virus that it can still remember and attack. A spokesman for the researchers said that his company, Immunome Inc, is developing an antibody cocktail that targets various sites of the virus. (https://bit.ly/3j73nDn)
COVID-19 may affect renal filtration
COVID-19 impairs the kidneys’ ability to filter waste and toxic substances in some patients, suggests a new report. Kidney filters generally do not allow too much protein to enter the urine. The researchers who studied 103 patients with COVID-19 found that about 24% of them had high levels of the protein albumin in the urine and 21% had high levels of the protein cystatin and in the urine. About 25% of patients had a non-infectious fragment of the coronavirus in their urine, but none of the samples contained an infectious virus. This suggests that the virus particles the researchers saw were “a direct result of a filtration abnormality, rather than a viral kidney infection,” according to a report published on medRxiv Sunday before the peer review. None of the patients showed signs of renal dysfunction, other than filtration problems. “At this stage, we don’t know whether or not these abnormalities are a sign of long-term consequences,” said co-author Choukri Ben Mamoun of the Yale School of Medicine. “It is for this reason that we report these findings and emphasize the need for a long-term examination of the consequences of this infection.” (https://bit.ly/3oDhHF4)
Open https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl in an external browser to get a Reuters graph on vaccines under development.
Graphic: Tracking the vaccine race: http://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/VACCINE-TRACKER/xegpbqnlovq/
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Originally published