Extracts of an article in The Medical Device Network.
Long Covid patients were found to have autoantibodies in their blood, which would explain their long-term symptoms.
Research carried out at Imperial College London, UK, suggests that long Covid could soon be diagnosed by a simple blood test.
Pilot data has identified autoantibodies in the blood of long Covid patients. These autoantibodies were not found in the blood of people who recovered quickly from the virus or had never tested positive for the disease.
Many long Covid patients are coming to us because they’re finding it very difficult to access advice on the ME/CFS type symptoms they’re experiencing, like brain fog and post-exertional malaise.
I’m famously optimistic, so I’d hope that within six months we’d have a simple blood test that you could get from your GP, and that I think could have quite a big impact for people who don’t feel they’ve managed to convince their GP or accessed specialist care because instead of being my word against yours, it has a diagnostic test
Imperial College London professor of immunology Danny Altmann
Quotes from Dr Shepherd in the article
“Some of these people are now finding their diagnosis is being changed from long Covid into ME/CFS.”
“I would have thought in something like [Altmann’s research] it would be useful to have another control group of people with an overlapping condition like ME/CFS. Then you could test some samples in our biobank to see whether or not they’re producing the same results.”
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