LOS ANGELES (Dispatches) -- Researchers have found that people with prior infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have a wide variety of autoantibodies up to six months after they have fully recovered.
The Cedars-Sinai investigators recruited 177 people with confirmed evidence of a previous infection with SARS-CoV-2. They compared blood samples from these individuals with samples taken from healthy people prior to the pandemic. All those with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection had elevated levels of autoantibodies. Some of the autoantibodies also have been found in people with diseases in which the immune system attacks its own healthy cells, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Some of the autoantibodies have been linked to autoimmune diseases that typically affect women more often than men. But men had a higher number of elevated autoantibodies than women in this study.