Covid-19 can cause impacts on the body that go beyond changes in the respiratory system, with prolonged symptoms that can last for weeks or months. The long Covid call is associated with neurological, behavioral changes, insomnia, muscle and joint pain.
The burden of coronavirus infection outside the respiratory tract and the time of viral elimination are not yet fully understood by the scientific community. A group of researchers from the United States made relevant findings about the ability of the virus to spread in the human body.
According to the study, the coronavirus can spread to various tissues in the human body, in addition to the respiratory system, including the brain. The results were published in the journal Nature in December.
The researchers performed autopsies on 44 patients who were victims of Covid-19. They analyzed a broad sampling of the central nervous system in 11 of these patients, to map and quantify the distribution, replication and cell-type specificity of SARS-CoV-2 in the human body, including the brain, from acute infection to more than seven years. months after the onset of symptoms.
From the analysis, they discovered that the virus is capable of being widely distributed throughout the body, especially among those patients who died with severe cases of the disease. Furthermore, virus replication is present in various respiratory and non-respiratory tissues, including the brain, early in the infection.
The RNA, which is the genetic material of the virus, persisted in multiple locations in the body, including the entire brain, up to 230 days after the onset of symptoms in one of the cases studied. The researchers state that, despite the extensive viral RNA distribution, little evidence of inflammation or cellular changes caused by the virus outside the respiratory tract was observed.
Data indicate that, in some patients, the coronavirus can cause systemic infection and persist in the body for months.
Previous research has proposed that virus detection in non-respiratory tissues may be due to residual blood or cross-contamination of the lungs during tissue collection. However, the researchers of the recent study claim that the data found indicate otherwise.
Specifically, only 12 of the evaluated cases had detectable RNA in a postmortem plasma sample, with only two cases having SARS-CoV-2 subgenomic RNA detected in plasma.
“Our results show that although the greatest burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in the respiratory tissues, the virus can spread throughout the body. Our data support an early viremic phase, which disperses the virus throughout the body after respiratory tract infection.
Source: CNN Brasil
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