Clinical and immunological characteristics of post-covid patients with infectious immunopathology syndrome

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has caused global morbidity and high mortality worldwide. Today it is known that, despite recovery from COVID-19, confirmed by both laboratory and instrumental diagnostic methods, many patients, regardless of the severity of the disease, suffer from a significant deterioration in health and increased exacerbations of chronic diseases. During examinations by attending physicians, they note fatigue, an increase in cases of acute respiratory viral infections per year, an increase in relapses of skin diseases such as furunculosis, pyoderma, exacerbation of pulmonary pathologies, pathologies of the urinary tract of inflammatory origin, as well as chronic infectious diseases such as herpesvirus and human papillomavirus infections, which occur for the first time or are characterized by frequent relapses no less than six months after recovery from acute COVID-19. Such persistent post-infectious consequences are known as post-COVID syndrome. SARS-CoV-2 infection is accompanied by damage to both the acquired and innate immune systems. In previous work, we determined the role of B cells, cytotoxic T lymphocytes, natural killer cells and the regulatory properties of CD46, as well as its involvement in the processes of viral entry into the cell. In this study, we studied the relationship of immune disorders of these factors of innate and acquired immunity with the clinical manifestations of post-COVID infectious syndrome in this category of patients and the severity of lung damage in these patients during the acute period of COVID-19. The results of the study showed that in some patients more than six months after suffering from COVID-19, the following was revealed: in patients who had a coronavirus infection without lung damage, no violations of the innate and acquired parts of the immune system were detected. In addition, significant differences were identified between clinical manifestations of diseases with increasing cases of relapses or newly identified after clinical recovery from an acute COVID-19 infection, depending on the phenotype of immune status disorders.