Coronavirus can persist for months in heart, brain and other organs of body: US study

Coronavirus can persist for months in heart, brain and other organs of body: US study

28.12.2021

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV--2, can spread within days from the airways to the heart, brain and almost every organ system in the body, where it may persist for months, a study found. In what they describe as the most comprehensive analysis to date of the virus’s distribution and persistence in the body and brain, scientists at the US National Institutes of Health said they found the pathogen is capable of replicating in human cells well beyond the respiratory tract. The results, released online on Saturday in a manuscript under review for publication in the journal Nature, point to delayed viral clearance as a potential contributor to the persistent symptoms wracking so-called long Covid sufferers.

“This is remarkably important work,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology centre at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who has led separate studies into the long-term effects of Covid-19. “For a long time now, we have been scratching our heads and asking why long Covid seems to affect so many organ systems. This paper sheds some light.” The findings haven’t yet been reviewed by independent scientists, and are mostly based on data gathered from fatal cases, not patients with long Covid.

The coronavirus’s propensity to infect cells outside the airways and lungs is contested, with numerous studies providing evidence for and against the possibility. The research is based on extensive sampling and analysis of tissues taken during autopsies on 44 patients who died. The burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance isn’t well characterised, particularly in the brain, wrote Daniel Chertow, who runs the NIH’s emerging pathogens section, and his colleagues. The group detected persistent SARSCoV-2 RNA in multiple parts of the body, including regions throughout the brain, for as long as 230 days following symptom onset. This may represent infection with defective virus, which has been described in persistent infection with the measles virus, they said. BLOOMBERG

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