Most people with COVID-19 experience mild symptoms and recover at home. However, early in the pandemic, it became clear that those with cardiovascular risk factors were more likely to develop severe illness and require hospital care.
Dr Marc Österdahl (Specialist registrar in Geriatric Medicine and General Internal Medicine, and doctoral research fellow at King’s College London) and CSS Biobank researchers looked at blood samples from 4,787 CSS Biobank participants across the full spectrum of COVID-19, from people who had asymptomatic COVID-19 to those who had post-COVID Syndrome (symptoms for more than 12 weeks). We also looked at the metabolic profiles of participants who reported ongoing symptoms like COVID-19 – such as a cough, headache, and fatigue – but who were found to have negative antibodies for the virus.
Our results show that participants who had higher levels of harmful fats, commonly linked to heart disease, were more likely to experience ongoing symptoms from both COVID-19 and non-COVID disease. That is, both people with longer illness, regardless of whether they had COVID-19, both had a set of compounds in their blood commonly seen in patients who are at risk of heart disease and diabetes. We found no association between illness duration and the gut microbiome.
These findings suggest that treatments for other diseases could inform new ways to treat COVID-19.
Österdahl, M. F., Whiston, R., Sudre, C. H., Asnicar, F., Cheetham, N. J., Miguez, A. B., Bowyer, V., Antonelli, M., Snell, O., dos Santos Canas, L., Hu, C., Wolf, J., Menni, C., Malim, M., Hart, D., Spector, T., Berry, S., Segata, N., Doores, K., … Steves, C. J. (2022). Metabolomic and gut microbiome profiles across the spectrum of community-based COVID and non-COVID disease: A COVID-19 Biobank study. medRxiv.
Österdahl, M. F., Whiston, R., Sudre, C. H., Asnicar, F., Cheetham, N. J., Blanco Miguez, A., Bowyer, V., Antonelli, M., Snell, O., dos Santos Canas, L., Hu, C., Wolf, J., Menni, C., Malim, M., Hart, D., Spector, T., Berry, S., Segata, N., Doores, K., … Steves, C. J. (2023). Metabolomic and gut microbiome profiles across the spectrum of community-based COVID and non-COVID disease. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 10407.
Links to publications
Online journal article in MedRxiv (pre-print)
Online journal article in Scientific Reports
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