Although the coronavirus pandemic appears to be diminishing, findings regarding it continue to emerge, and now a recent study showed that people can have antibodies for at least four months after contracting COVID-19.
Research published Sept. 1 in the
New England Journal of Medicine
was based on more than 30,000 blood samples that were checked for the presence of antibodies.
These samples came from three groups of participants: those with confirmed coronavirus cases, those who had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but were not necessarily infected, and those with no known exposure.
According to the analysis, the researchers focused on a small subset of 487 people who had undergone more than one antibody test, allowing the experts to identify whether antibody levels remained stable or faded over time.
The result in this group was that antibody levels increased in the first two months after their diagnosis and remained stable for the next two months.
"There is no evidence of a slight decrease," detailed in the document Dr.
Kári Stefánsson
, co-author of the study and founder of the Icelandic biotechnology company deCODE genetics.
Stefánsson also noted that the research detected antibodies in a significant number of people who had been asymptomatic and never tested for COVID-19.
"Not everyone developed antibodies after infection," the authors noted, suggesting that some people may have weaker immune responses to the virus.
However, it is possible that those people had false positive diagnostic tests and never got sick.
On the other hand, the specialists also noticed other important evidences.
For example, they found that antibody levels were higher in older patients and in those with more severe disease.
While in women they were lower compared to men, and smokers had lower ranges than non-smokers.
"What you're seeing here is that they're inducing a pretty strong immune response," added
Jason Kindrachuk
, assistant professor of medical microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
But, although recent findings suggest that antibody levels remain stable for at least four months, there are still many doubts, as scientists do not yet know how these antibodies reflect immunity against the virus and its inhibition.
"Just because you see antibody production doesn't tell you that those antibodies will act specifically against the virus,"
Kindrachuk
wrote
.
In other words, it is not yet clear whether antibodies could protect us from reinfection.
Meanwhile, last August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new rules when it comes to testing a person, saying that people diagnosed with COVID-19 do not need to be tested again during three months if they do not develop any symptoms of the virus.
Currently, confirmed cases of people reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 are very rare, however, recently it became known that four people were re-infected, the only cases of this type among more than twenty-five million confirmed cases worldwide. the world, according to the Johns Hopkins University real-time map.
This research is not the first to reveal that antibodies can remain for some time after infection, as an article published in MedRxiv showed that antibody levels were stable for at least three months in patients who had recovered from the infection. disease in New York City.
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