Scientists have identified specific proteins in the blood plasma of people infected with COVID that can help predict which patients will need to be placed on ventilators to breathe and which are most likely to die from the virus. Scientists from the Washington University School of Medicine in the US studied blood plasma samples from 332 patients.
Study lead researcher Carlos Cruchaga says “Identifying harmful proteins can be useful as we not only face variants of the virus, but also when new viruses emerge in the future, we may be able to take blood from an individual with a COVID infection, check the levels of these key proteins and quickly determine the risk of serious consequences. We could then use this information to determine the best course of treatment”.
The team studied plasma samples from COVID-19 patients admitted to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis in the US and compared them with plasma samples from 150 people who were not infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Samples were obtained when patients were admitted to the hospital, the proteins associated with worse outcomes from COVID-19 were identified long before patients were actually placed on ventilators or died from the virus.
covid patients get seriously ill
The researchers performed further testing to distinguish which proteins actually caused severe disease from those that became dysregulated as a result of severe disease.
Although the research team identified a large number of proteins that were altered in patients with COVID-19, they found that the presence of any of the 32 proteins that become dysregulated during a COVID infection indicates that patients will need help breathing from a ventilator.
They identified another five proteins that, when found to be altered in blood plasma as a result of the virus, indicated a patient’s likelihood of death.
“Many of the proteins we identified were related to inflammation and the body’s immune response, for example, so it was not surprising that they were altered by the COVID infection,” Cruchaga said.
“But a subset of these proteins made it more likely that patients would need ventilation or die.” Using these proteomic approaches, we now have a methodology that allows us to predict problems, and this can be very important for clinical practice,” said the researcher.
COVID-19 infection were associated with coronary artery disease
Among the 332 COVID-19 patients studied, those whose blood plasma had any of 32 dysregulated proteins proteins that indicated they might require ventilation to breathe eventually needed help breathing, usually about a week after being admitted to the hospital (82 patients).
Of the 332 patients, according to the researchers, only those who had changes in the five proteins that the researchers associated with severe disease (63 patients) eventually died of the infection. The research also showed that some of the proteins that were dysregulated during COVID-19 infection were associated with coronary artery disease.
They also studied similar proteomic data from 297 COVID-19 patients and 76 controls at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and found that the same proteins indicated the eventual need for ventilators and the likelihood of death in both groups of patients.
Scientist says “This was a surprising finding because this project was not focused on these questions, some of the proteins we identified are causal proteins in Alzheimer’s pathology, and others are used as biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, both in blood and cerebrospinal fluid”.
Written by: Vaishali Verma
Read Now:Indian Union Minister says StartUps in India have grown 300 times in last 9 years
