COVID-19 in overdrive
One-fifth of hospitalized patients develop coronavirus antibodies that attack their tissue
At least 1 in 5 hospitalized COVID-19 patients develop new antibodies that attack their own tissue within a week of admission, a Stanford Medicine-led study shows.
“If you get sick enough from COVID-19 to end up in the hospital, you may not be out of the woods even after you recover,” said PJ Utz, MD, professor of immunology and rheumatology and co-senior author of research published in September 2021 in Nature Communications.
The rogue attackers, called autoantibodies, could result from immune-system overdrive triggered by a virulent, lingering infection, researchers said. The abundance of cytokines — proteins the immune cells rally to fight infection — may trigger the erroneous production of antibodies targeting them, Utz said.
Vaccinations, he added, decrease the likelihood the immune system will be confused into generating autoantibodies.
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