Scientists of the Cedar Sinai Medical Center in the United States revealed that even soft or asymptomatic COVID-19 can cause a long immune response directed against the tissues and organs itself. The consequences of coronavirus infection are reported in the article published in Journal of Translational Medicine.
177 people who have sought COVID-19 took part in the study. Specialists compared blood samples of these people with samples taken from healthy people to a pandemic. It turned out that the first group has an increased level of autoantiboders, which are usually found in people with chronic autoimmune diseases, such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
Some of the autoantibodies are associated with autoimmune diseases, which usually affect women more often than men. However, in this study, men had more elevated autoantiboders than women.
In the future, scientists plan to find out whether autoantibodes are generated from vaccinated people with breakthrough infections, that is, with symptomatic COVID-19, which developed despite the vaccination.