New research points to four factors that may increase the likelihood of a long COVID infection.

One of the numerous questions surrounding lengthy COVID is who is more susceptible to getting it. Is it true that certain persons are more prone than others to develop physical, neurological, or cognitive problems months after their coronavirus infections have cleared?

A group of researchers has uncovered biological variables that may help predict whether a person would develop lengthy COVID after following more than 200 patients for two to three months after their COVID diagnosis.

The study, which was published in the journal Cell on Tuesday, discovered four parameters that could be detected early in a person's coronavirus infection and looked to be linked to a higher likelihood of experiencing long-term symptoms weeks later.

The researchers discovered a link between these characteristics and protracted COVID (also known as post acute sequelae of COVID-19, or PASC) whether the original infection was severe or moderate, according to the researchers. They speculated that the findings might point to approaches to avoid or cure some cases of protracted COVID, such as providing individuals antiviral drugs as soon as an infection is detected.

Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, stated, "It's the first real solid attempt to come up with some physiological reasons for extended COVID."

He and other experts, as well as the study's authors, stressed that the findings were preliminary and would require much more research to confirm.

"They've discovered these four significant elements," Deeks remarked. Each is scientifically reasonable, compatible with other people's hypotheses, and, most importantly, actionable. If these pathways are proven, physicians may create therapies that will help individuals get better. That is the message to take away."

The quantity of coronavirus RNA in the blood early in the infection, which is a measure of viral load, is one of the four parameters found by researchers. Another factor is the development of autoantibodies, which are antibodies that wrongly target bodily tissues, as in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects most individuals when they are young and then generally goes dormant, is a third cause.

The last predictor is having Type 2 diabetes, however the researchers and other experts cautioned that in larger trials with more patients, diabetes may turn out to be just one of multiple medical factors that raise the chance of chronic COVID.

"I think this research emphasizes the importance of taking measurements early in the disease course to figure out how to treat patients, even if we don't know how we're going to use all that information yet," said Jim Heath, the study's principal investigator and president of the Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle-based nonprofit biomedical research organization.

"We performed this research because we know people will go to physicians and say they're weary all the time or something, and the physician will just urge them to get more sleep," Heath said. That isn't really useful. As a result, we wanted to be able to quantify and declare that there is a problem with these people."

He noted that two or three months after infection, 37% of the patients exhibited three or more signs of extended COVID. Another 24% said they had one or two symptoms, while 39% said they had none. When individuals with three or more symptoms were diagnosed with COVID-19, 95 percent had one or more of the four biological variables discovered in the research, according to Heath.

Autoantibodies proved to be the most important element, since they were linked to two-thirds of the instances with extended COVID, according to Heath. According to him, each of the other three criteria appeared in around a third of the cases, and there was a lot of overlap, with some individuals having several factors.