As of the end of 2020, the number of only diagnosed longcoid patients in the world reached five and a half million people. Then he was included in the official list of individual diseases and began to represent a serious social problem. The situation was aggravated by the fact that many doctors did not know anything about this complication, did not understand what was happening to the patients, considering them either simulators or aggravants (exaggerating their illness), and often referred people to a psychiatrist.
According to the most optimistic estimates, about a third of those who have suffered from COVID-19 become hostages of the Longkovid. But the nature of this was unclear. Why does someone suffer from longcovid, and someone does not, does not the virus remain forever in the body, that is, are we dealing with persistence (the ability of pathogenic microorganisms to survive for a long time in the host’s body)? Or did the immune system still cope with the “invader”, and he is absent in the body, but there is a mass of damage inflicted by him in many organs and systems? By striking at the weakest points, the virus triggered autoimmune or neuropathic complications.
“Almost a year has passed since I had been ill. The condition is the same. Temperature 37.1-37.5, weakness, heavy breathing, muscle aches, weakness, no appetite, nausea. I do not believe that I will ever get out of this nightmare, ”says 47-year-old Vera.
“I desperately want to recover, play sports again, go with my friends to cafes and visit, but I can’t even get out of bed. If it hadn’t been for the telecommuter at work, I don’t know what I would have done, ”complains 32-year-old Larisa.
People can drink vitamins, visit doctors, get tested regularly, and try all the new treatment protocols that the Aesculapians offer them – and yet the symptoms of Longcovid do not go away. But what can I say, I myself experienced a similar thing in the spring of 2020, when no one had even heard of this term.
“It doesn’t seem like a recovery, but rather a short-term remission. Because there are days when nothing hurts me at all. But I do not have time to get used to it and be happy, ”I remember, I wrote in those days.
By the way, Paul Garner, a professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, was the first to describe this condition. As if in some fantasy novel, an alien virus entered all the systems of the body and rebuilt, modified, debugged them to fit its needs.
And even then, many doctors wondered: are these manifestations of coronavirus similar to herpes symptoms? After all, having got into a person, he will also remain inside him forever. Reactivating with every drop in immunity.
Recently, researchers may have solved this mystery.
“More than 95 percent of the world’s healthy adults are infected with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The virus usually just slumbers in the body and goes unnoticed. However, illness, stress and other factors can reactivate the infection and cause Pfeiffer’s glandular fever, ”the German scientists believe.
After conducting research, they found that in most people, after infection with the coronavirus, EBV also becomes active. Moreover, most often it affects not those who have been seriously ill, but those who have suffered a weak or moderate course of the coronavirus.
“The symptoms of longcoid really resemble the disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus,” experts say.
The victims themselves mention, among other things, the following complaints: difficulties in concentrating, difficulty finding words, headache, memory problems, “brain fog”, fatigue, sleep disturbances, joint numbness and muscle pain. And this is all very similar to the manifestations of EBV.
There have been several studies that have tested 185 people suffering from postcoid syndrome. When scientists examined samples of their blood, it turned out that 66.7 percent at that time had reactivated EBV infection, raised antibodies to this disease. On the other hand, in people without longcoid, reactivated Epstein-Barr virus was found in only ten percent of all cases.
The connection between the Epstein-Barr virus and SARS-cov-2 was also looked for at the Yuan hospital in the notorious Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected at the end of 2019. Based on old observations from a Chinese group of experts, American and Turkish researchers have continued to explore what kind of relationship might exist between the two viruses.
“Our results indicate that many of the symptoms of long covid may not be directly related to the CoV-2 virus, but rather to EBV reactivation caused by COVID-19,” conclude scientists from the team of Jeffrey Gold, MD.
Because the patient complaints are so similar to each other, the researchers suspect that Epstein-Barr virus is behind at least some of the longcoid cases.
“While EBV reactivation is not responsible for all complications from Covid-19, there is a lot of evidence that it plays a significant role in most longcovid cases.”
There is an assumption that it is the spike protein, the spike of the coronavirus, an infectious protein structurally similar to human proteins, that initiates the Epstein-Barr reactivation. Research is ongoing.
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