Having Covid-19 increases the risk of developing an autoimmune disease within a year of infection, reports a large study conducted in South Korea and Japan, but vaccination is helping to combat this risk.
The researchers used the medical records of 10 million Korean adults and 12 million Japanese adults to see if those with Covid were more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic disease, or AIRD, within a year of infection. AIRD includes rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren’s syndrome, combined connective tissue disease, vasculitis, and other conditions. The Covid organization was compared to an uninfected control organization and an organization of patients who had influenza at the same time from 2020 to 2022.
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In the South Korean and Japanese cohorts, the researchers found an increased risk of autoimmune disease up to one year after Covid infection. Compared to the general population, the Covid organization had about a 25% higher risk of AIRD. Compared to the flu organization, the threat about 30% more in those who had had Covid. And the more severe a person’s Covid episode, the greater the risk of developing a new autoimmune disease, according to findings published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, highlighting why it’s vital. to save you from the infection in the first place.
The researchers also found that Covid vaccination, by injection of mRNA or viral vector, reduced the risk of developing a new autoimmune disease. In the study, they specified how much the vaccines reduced the risk of AIRD. And after a year, the threat of AIRD by the Covid organization has returned to normal. These numbers are at the population level, so the threat of an individual can be higher or lower depending on their susceptibility.
While other researchers have reported similar findings, the new study is one of the largest exploring post-Covid headaches in Asian populations, adding valuable insights into vaccination and autoimmune diseases in understudied ethnic groups and showing what researchers can learn from detailed studies from the South. Korea and Japan incorporated fitness knowledge sets. The findings provide “rigorous evidence” to deepen our understanding of the long-term consequences of Covid, said Alison Cohen, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. to the evidence base that COVID-19 is worse than the flu,” he said in an email.
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Lead author Min Seo Kim, a physician-scientist at Harvard’s Broad Institute, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, said the decrease in the threat of AIRD after one year may simply imply a decrease in autoimmunity over time after Covid infection. infection, if patients are “really well cared for right now, they’re going to be less likely to suffer from this disease for the rest of their lives,” he said.
The pandemic and the emergence of long Covid have made the need to understand (and find remedies) more pressing for emerging rates of autoimmune diseases around the world, including the United States. It is estimated that up to 50 million Americans live with an autoimmune disease.
South Korean leader Dong Keon Yon’s knowledge comes from the country’s national insurance system, which streamlines patient knowledge so that infections, vaccinations, and post-infection diagnostics are linked. Japanese knowledge was provided through Seung Won Lee, one of the paper’s s.
Only patients with twice-registered RFIA were analyzed. The researchers also replicated the findings in patients who underwent treatment for an autoimmune disease. This technique aimed to weed out patients who might have faced short-term headaches due to Covid, Kim said. “Steroid immunotherapy is not easy for patients to follow, so doctors don’t actually do it, they put it on the table without confidence,” he said, adding that the researchers were pretty confident they had discovered genuine cases of AIRD.
The flu control organization was used to minimize the initial bias: the likelihood that Covid patients would be diagnosed with autoimmune diseases at higher rates just because they got more medical care than the general uninfected population during the pandemic.
Some outdoor researchers may not be convinced that the cases of AIRD reported in the article constitute a true chronic disease. Amr Hakam Sawalha, head of the department of pediatric rheumatology at the Children’s Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, suspects that some of the cases of AIRD reported in the study are possibly just temporary increases in the immune system. Many of the diseases included in the analysis, such as rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis, take more than a few months to succeed in a “full clinical trial. “presentation,” to be analyzed and diagnosed, he said. The fact that the study found a lower risk of AIRD at 12 months drew attention.
Sawalha also noted that the diagnostic codes used by researchers to identify the presence of autoimmune diseases may simply not be validated. Those considerations could be addressed by some other study with a longer follow-up window and confirmation of effects in other populations, he said. “That said, the authors should be congratulated on this study,” he added.
Kim’s studies analyzed data from the original SARS-CoV-2 strain and the Delta variant. Cohen noted that it would be cost-effective to mirror studies with people infected with Omicron strains and with people reinfected with Covid.
But the fact that an increased threat of autoimmune disease has been discovered with the first batch of variants lends credence to the concept that earlier, more competitive waves are more harmful to the body, said Falko Tesch, a research associate at the Center for Evidence-Based Studies. . Healthcare in Dresden, Germany, which conducted its own studies on increased autoimmunity after Covid.
To prevent the virus from disappearing, it weakens over time and kills fewer people. So later variants may also be more contagious, spread faster, but cause less severe illness and potentially less severe long-term consequences, Tesch said. This is information that should be on hand for long-term pandemics, as public health officials could propose more thorough screening of inflamed people to detect autoimmune diseases early, he said.
Even as variants weaken, “every year a new proportion of other people move into the pool of other people with autoimmune diseases,” he said. “Every year. “
Kim, the lead author, suspects that the decreased risk of autoimmunity in those who have been immunized is possibly due to the fact that vaccination can lessen the severity of Covid. The only exception for patients who developed severe Covid and had to be hospitalised. despite vaccination. This organization maintained a greater threat of later autoimmune diseases.
Reducing the risk of rheumatic diseases, according to Abraham Edgar Gracia-Ramos, a researcher at La Raza National Medical Center in Mexico City who was not involved in the study, is “one more explanation for why inspiring other people to get vaccinated. “
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