COVID-19 tagged posts

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses? It largely comes down to variability in genetics (the genes you inherit) and life experience (your environmental, infection, and vaccination history).

These two influences are imprinted on our cells through small molecular alterations called epigenetic changes, which shape cell identity and function by controlling whether genes are turned “on” or “off.”

Salk Institute researchers are debuting a new epigenetic catalog that reveals the distinct effects of genetic inheritance and life experience on various types of immune cells...

Researchers have uncovered a link between COVID-19 and blood markers linked to faulty proteins in the brain. The analysis, led by researchers at Imperial College London and the UK Dementia Research Institute, found that people who had previously had COVID-19 were more likely to have increased levels of biomarkers linked to faulty amyloid proteins—a known hallmark for Alzheimer’s disease.

On average, the effects were comparable to four years of aging with the greatest effects seen in those hospitalized with severe COVID-19 or with underlying risk factors for dementia such as smoking or high blood pressure.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that mild or moderate COVID-19 may acceler...

Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center have made a surprising discovery: antibodies can have opposite effects on viral infections in human cells.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, enables the virus to enter human cells and is the primary target for the body’s antibodies. Previous research has shown that antibodies can either block the virus, have no effect, or, in rare cases, assist the virus in infecting cells. While antibody drugs work to block infections, this new study challenges current understanding of their mechanisms.

Published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, this study is the first to identify an antibody that can both a...

Researchers have uncovered how hormones profoundly affect our immune systems, explaining why men and women are affected by diseases differently.

Scientists from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Imperial College London have shown for the first time which aspects of our immune systems are regulated by sex hormones, and the impacts this has on disease risk and health outcomes in males and females.

It is well established that diseases can affect men and women differently, due to subtle differences in our immune systems. For example, the immune condition systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is nine-times more likely to affect women, or with COVID-19, males are known to have a greater risk of acute first-time infections, while females have a greater risk of long-COVID.

But it ...