Drone company Zipline delivers medical supplies and clinical laboratory specimens on four continents and is used in the US by several major healthcare networks and retail organizations
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, continue to demonstrate their value in the medical industry. In February, WellSpan Health announced it will soon begin using drones to deliver prescriptions to patients and to transport medical supplies and clinical laboratory specimens between its facilities located in Pennsylvania.
WellSpan Health, one of the leading healthcare systems in Southern Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland, is partnering with Zipline, a supplier of drone logistic services, in the endeavor.
“We’re making our [healthcare] system lower cost, faster, and more sustainable by bringing this exceptional technology to South Central Pennsylvania,” said Roxanna Gapstur, PhD, RN, President and CEO, WellSpan Health, in a news release. “We know the easier it is to access care the healthier people can be. With Zipline, we’re connecting healthcare straight to your front door.”
Zipline’s Platform 2 (P2 Zip) drone will be used for the venture. The drone is designed to fly in almost all weather conditions. If true, this would be a boon to the drone delivery service industry.
Previous attempts to implement drone delivery services have been hampered by a typical drone’s low performance in bad weather such as heavy rain and high winds. This seems to be what has held back wide adoption of drone delivery in the US.
“WellSpan continues to reimagine what healthcare can look like for our patients. With Zipline, we’re creating a future for our patients, where getting a prescription filled is as simple as pressing a button,” said Roxanna Gapstur, PhD, RN (above), President and CEO, WellSpan Health, in a news release. WellSpan Health’s drone delivery customers will be able to receive text notifications tracking the progress of their medical supplies and clinical laboratory specimens on their smartphones. (Photo copyright: WellSpan Health.)
Delivery of Medical Supplies Direct to Patients’ Front Door
ABC27 reported that “WellSpan will be the first health service in the state of Pennsylvania that will introduce this type of technology and delivery system.”
According to the drone company’s website, Zipline:
Serves more than 4,000 health centers worldwide and more than 45 million people.
Has completed more than one million deliveries.
Plans to operate more flights annually than almost all the major US airlines by next year.
Delivers 75% of Rwanda’s blood supply outside Kigali, the country’s capital city.
Additionally, Zipline’s all-electric, zero-emission drones reduce carbon emissions by an average of 97% when compared to gas-driven vehicles.
Each P2 Zip drone features Zipline’s autonomous airspace Detect and Avoid (DAA) deconfliction technology and contains fully redundant flight systems.
“This acoustic system is composed of a series of small, lightweight acoustic microphones and onboard processors used to navigate airspace and grant 360-degree awareness with a range of up to 2,000 meters,” DRONELIFE reported. “This innovative onboard system enables the aircraft to autonomously detect and maneuver around other aircraft and obstacles in real-time, making large scale autonomous commercial operations more feasible.”
According to a fact sheet, the P2 Zip drone can carry loads up to eight pounds and has a cruising speed of 70 miles/hour. It’s service range is either a 10-mile radius or a one-way trip of 24 miles. It only requires two feet of open space to execute a delivery and can hover at more than 300 feet above the ground while delivering a package.
“Zipline has been improving access to healthcare for eight years. Together with WellSpan Health we will bring prescriptions and medical products right to patients’ doorsteps with fast, sustainable, and convenient delivery,” stated Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, in the news release.
Other Healthcare Drone Delivery Services
Dark Daily has published many ebriefs about drones being used for medical supply and clinical laboratory specimen deliveries.
As drone delivery technology continues to improve, UAVs are more likely to be used in healthcare situations. If the issue of bad weather has been resolved, it’s reasonable to assume that within a short period of time clinical laboratories may begin receiving many more samples to test via drones.
Lack of regular clinical laboratory screenings in this age group at least partially to blame, researchers say
While cervical cancer rates have seen a 50-year decline overall, that trend is shifting among 30- to 40 year-olds who have experienced a near 2% increase from 2012-2019. This finding comes from a 2024 American Cancer Society (ACS) report that is eyeing the timeline of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines and the lack of clinical laboratory cancer screenings as possible contributors to this new trend.
Though a 2% increase is significant, the study, which was published in CA: ACancer Journal for Clinicians, titled “Cancer Statistics, 2024,” noted that these cancers were “mostly early, curable tumors,” epidemiologist Ahmedin Jemal DVM, PhD, Senior Vice President Surveillance and Health Equity Science at ACS, and senior author of the new report, told NBC News.
To understand how the increase in cancer rates impacts this age group, consider the numbers: “About 13,800 American women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year and 4,360 die from the disease,” NBC reported.
US vaccination programs for youths have lagged behind nations that have embraced HPV vaccination to positive results.
Australia, for example, has vaccinated a high proportion of its youth since the vaccine was first released in 2006. In 2023, the nation created its National Strategy for the Elimination of Cervical Cancer in Australia program and expects cervical cancer to be fully eliminated there by 2035.
For lab professionals, this demonstrates how new technologies like the HPV test and vaccine can alter how individuals are screened for diseases, and how vaccines can reduce and even eliminate diseases that were once common.
“We need to make sure we are not forgetting about that generation that was a little too old for HPV vaccination,” Jennifer Spencer, PhD (above), Assistant Professor, Department of Population Health and Department Internal Medicine, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin, told NBC News. “The onus is on the healthcare system to think about who is slipping through the cracks,” she added. Lack of clinical laboratory screenings among the 30-40 age group may be contributing to the increase in cervical cancer rates. (Photo copyright: Dell Medical School.)
Lack of Clinical Laboratory Screenings
Research points to a lag in cervical cancer screenings as a possible cause for the recent rise in cases. Timely screening allows doctors to both identify and remove any worrisome lesions before they become cancerous, Jennifer Spencer, PhD, Assistant Professor of the Department of Population Health, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin, told NBC News.
Screenings for women ages 21-65 have fallen 15% since 2000, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. Also, more than half of women with cervical cancer have “either never been screened or haven’t been screened in the past five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” NBC reported.
The US Preventative Services Task Force recommends that women 21-29 years of age should receive Pap smears every three years. Women 30-65 years of age should do the same, or every five years with an HPV test or combo test.
Despite a decrease in cervical cancer, 29% of women in their 20s are overdue to get screening, NBC noted. This was the age group most likely to be lagging on getting screened. Spencer says that this delay in screening could explain the resulting increase in cervical cancer among the 30-40 age group.
Causes for Lack in Screenings
Regardless of age group, women who were uninsured, in a rural area, non-white, or identifying as lesbian, bisexual, or gay were also more likely to be overdue on screenings, according to Spencer’s study.
In addition, women who just moved to the United States may have missed their screenings, thus increasing risk, epidemiologist Nicholas Wentzensen, MD, PhD, Deputy Director, Senior Investigator, and Head of the Clinical Epidemiology Unit at the National Cancer Institute, told NBCNews.
Additionally, Spencer found in her research that confusion exists by both patients and doctors on when cervical screening should take place. Some participants in her study did not have screening recommended by their doctors, while others simply did not recognize it was necessary.
“When women in one of Spencer’s studies were asked why they hadn’t been screened recently, they commonly said that they didn’t know they needed to be screened or that a health provider hadn’t recommended it. Only 1% [of] women ages 21 to 29 said they had skipped screening because they had received the HPV shot,” NBC News reported.
A 2022 Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) report also looked at screenings as a possible cause. Those researchers found that “only 73% of women with abnormal screening results received follow-up care,” NBC reported.
“If the increase (in cases) is real, it could be a result of missed screening opportunities at earlier ages, as suggested by the increase in squamous cell carcinoma and localized disease. It may also stem from a decrease in screening at younger ages,” the JAMA study authors wrote.
HPV Vaccine and Cervical Cancer Prevention
The HPV vaccine is another important area of research to be considered. Approved in 2006, HPV vaccines were beneficial because HPV “causes six types of cancer, including cervical cancer,” NBC reported.
Women in their early 20s at that time were the first generation to benefit from HPV vaccines, NBC noted. It may be that they continue to benefit in a decrease in cervical cancer among their cohort.
Countries that have emphasized HPV vaccines and stringent screenings in their cancer prevention efforts are reaping the benefits of that policy.
Though cancer screening and the HPV vaccine are important first steps women should take to prevent cervical cancer, follow-through clinical laboratory testing and diagnosis is crucial, Spencer added. This would include additional testing and treatment for any abnormal results of the cancer screening.
However, according to Spencer, “only 73% of women with abnormal screening results received follow-up care,” NBC reported.
Healthcare policymakers today are emphasizing the need for providers to identify and close gaps in care as a way to improve patient outcomes and help control the cost of care. Women who are overdue for a cervical cancer screening test—whether an HPV test or Pap smear—have this care gap. This creates an opportunity for clinical labs to add value.
Clinical laboratories could be helpful during this period by looking at patient files to note which patients are overdue for screenings and then alerting their doctors. Medical labs also could work directly with doctors to establish a program to reach out to patients. Labs would thus be adding value as well as benefitting patients.
Groups representing academic publishers are taking steps to combat paper mills that write the papers and then sell authorship spots
Clinical laboratory professionals rely on peer-reviewed research to keep up with the latest findings in pathology, laboratory medicine, and other medical fields. They should thus be interested in new efforts to combat the presence of “research paper mills,” defined as “profit oriented, unofficial, and potentially illegal organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research,” according to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a non-profit organization representing stakeholders in academic publishing.
“They may also handle the administration of submitting the article to journals for review and sell authorship to researchers once the article is accepted for publication,” the COPE website states.
In a recent example of how paper mills impact scholarly research, multinational publishing company John Wiley and Sons (Wiley) announced in The Scholarly Kitchen last year that it had retracted more than 1,700 papers published in journals from the company’s Hindawi subsidiary, which specializes in open-access academic publishing.
“In Hindawi’s case, this is a direct result of sophisticated paper mill activity,” wrote Jay Flynn, Wiley’s Executive Vice President and General Manager, Research, in a Scholarly Kitchen guest post. “The extent to which our processes and systems were breached required an end-to-end review of every step in the peer review and publishing process.”
In addition, journal indexer Clarivate removed 19 Hindawi journals from its Web of Science list in March 2023, due to problems with their editorial quality, Retraction Watch reported.
Hindawi later shut down four of the journals, which had been “heavily compromised by paper mills,” according to a blog post from the publisher.
Wiley also announced at that time that it would temporarily pause Hindawi’s special issues publishing program due to compromised articles, according to a press release.
“We urgently need a collaborative, forward-looking and thoughtful approach to journal security to stop bad actors from further abusing the industry’s systems, journals, and the communities we serve,” wrote Jay Flynn (above), Wiley EVP and General Manager, Research and Learning, in an article he penned for The Scholarly Kitchen. “We’re committed to addressing the challenge presented by paper mills and academic fraud head on, and we invite our publishing peers, and the many organizations that work alongside us, to join us in this endeavor.” Clinical laboratory leaders understand the critical need for accurate medical research papers. (Photo copyright: The Scholarly Kitchen.)
Using AI to Detect Paper Mill Submissions
Wiley acquired Hindawi in 2021 in a deal valued at $298 million, according to a press release, but the subsidiary has since become a financial drain for the company.
The journals earn their revenue by charging fees to authors. But in fiscal year 2024, which began last fall, “Wiley expects $35-40 million in lost revenue from Hindawi as it works to turn around journals with issues and retract articles,” Retraction Watch reported, citing an earnings call.
Wiley also revealed that it would stop using the Hindawi brand name and bring the subsidiary’s remaining journals under its own umbrella by the middle of 2024.
The service will incorporate tools to detect signs that submissions originated from paper mills, including similarities with “known papermill hallmarks” and use of “tortured phrases” indicating that passages were translated by AI-based language models, according to a press release.
These tools include:
Papermill Similarity Detection: Checks for known papermill hallmarks and compares content against existing papermills papers.
Problematic Phrase Recognition: Flags unusual alternatives to established terms.
Unusual Publication Behavior Detection: Identifies irregular publishing patterns by paper authors.
Researcher Identity Verification: Helps detect potential bad actors.
Gen-AI Generated Content Detection: Identifies potential misuse of generative AI.
Journal Scope Checker: Analyzes the article’s relevance to the journal.
The company said that the new service will be available through Research Exchange, Wiley’s manuscript submission platform, as early as next year.
Other Efforts to Spot Paper Mill Submissions
Previously, STM announced the launch of the STM Integrity Hub, with a mission “to equip the scholarly communication community with data, intelligence, and technology to protect research integrity,” Program Director Joris van Rossum, PhD, told The Scholarly Kitchen.
In 2023, the group announced that the hub would integrate Papermill Alarm from Clear Skies, a paper mill detection tool launched in 2022 with a focus on cancer research. It uses a “traffic-light rating system for research papers,” according to a press release.
In an announcement about the launch of Wiley’s Papermill Detection service, Retraction Watch suggested that one key to addressing the problem would be to reduce incentives for authors to use paper mills. Those incentives boil down to the pressure placed on many scientists, clinicians, and students to publish manuscripts, according to the research report from STM and COPE.
In one common scenario, the report noted, a paper mill will submit a staff-written paper to multiple journals. If the paper is accepted, the company will list it on a website and offer authorship spaces for sale.
“If a published paper is challenged, the ‘author’ may sometimes back down and ask for the paper to be retracted because of data problems, or they may try to provide additional supporting information including a supporting letter from their institution which is also a fake,” the report noted.
All of this serves as a warning to pathologists and clinical laboratory professionals to carefully evaluate the sources of medical journals publishing studies that feature results on areas of healthcare and lab medicine research that are of interest.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) concluded its review of the final rule on April 22. Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, and other regulatory experts expect the White House to send the final rule to Congress as early as late April and no later than May 22.
On Tuesday morning, Lâle White, executive chair and CEO of San Diego’s XiFin, Inc., will present a keynote on new regulations and diagnostics players that are “poised to reshape lab testing.” Her presentation is followed by a general session on Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) regulations featuring Salerno Reynolds, PhD., acting director at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Center for Laboratory Systems and Response.
Robert Michel, Editor-in-Chief of The Dark Report will wrap day one with a general session on the regulatory trifecta coming soon to all labs, from LDT to CLIA to private payers’ policies for genetic claims.
Innovation in the spotlight
“It’s a rich mix of expert speakers, lab leaders who are doing innovative things in their own organizations, along with the consultants and the lab vendors who are pushing the front edge of laboratory management, operations, and clinical service delivery,” says Michel, who each year creates the agenda for EWC.
Several sessions, master classes, and speakers will look to the future with discussions about how healthcare data drives innovations in diagnostics and patient care, digital pathology adoption around the world, and hot topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data and precision medicine.
Panels offer a variety of viewpoints
“One valuable benefit of participating at the Executive War College is the various panel discussions,” Michel says. “Each panel brings together national experts in a specific area of the laboratory profession. As an example, our lab legal panel this year brings together four prominent and experienced attorneys who share opinions, insights, and commentary about relevant issues in compliance, regulations, and contractual issues with health plans and others.”
This allows attendees to experience a breadth of opinions from multiple respected experts in this area, he adds.
For example, a digital pathology panel will bring together representatives from labs, service providers, and the consultants that are helping labs implement digital pathology. The session will be especially helpful to labs that are deciding when to acquire digital pathology tools and how to deploy them effectively to improve diagnostic accuracy, Michel says.
And a managed care panel will feature executives from some of the nation’s biggest health plans—the ones that sit on the other side of the table from labs—to provide insights and guidance on how labs can work more effectively with them.
Networking opportunities abound
The event is about much more than politics and policy, however. There’s also a distinct social aspect.
“Everyone is welcome, and everyone appreciates the camaraderie, so don’t be shy about going up and introducing yourself to someone. The quality of the crowd is top-notch, yet I’ve always experienced a willingness for those of us who have been to this rodeo to always be welcoming,” she notes.
Michel agrees. “One of the special benefits of participation at the EWC is the superb networking interactions and collaboration that takes place,” he says.
“From the first moments that attendees walk into our opening reception on Monday night until the close of the optional workshops on Thursday, one can see a rich exchange happening amongst circles of attendees. Introductions are being made. Connections are developing into business opportunities. The sum of an attendee’s experience at the Executive War College is to gain as much knowledge from the networking and collaboration as they do from the sessions.”
Speedy DNA sequencing and on-the-spot digital imaging may change the future of anatomic pathology procedures during surgery
Researchers at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CMM) at UMC Utrecht, a leading international university medical center in the Netherlands, have paired artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with DNA sequencing to develop a diagnostic tool cancer surgeons can use during surgeries to determine in minutes—while the patient is still on the operating table—whether they have fully removed all the cancerous tissue.
The method, “involves a computer scanning segments of a tumor’s DNA and alighting on certain chemical modifications that can yield a detailed diagnosis of the type and even subtype of the brain tumor,” according to The New York Times, which added, “That diagnosis, generated during the early stages of an hours-long surgery, can help surgeons decide how aggressively to operate, … In the future, the method may also help steer doctors toward treatments tailored for a specific subtype of tumor.”
This technology has the potential to reduce the need for frozen sections, should additional development and studies confirm that it accurately and reliably shows surgeons that all cancerous cells were fully removed. Many anatomic pathologists would welcome such a development because of the time pressure and stress associated with this procedure. Pathologists know that the patient is still in surgery and the surgeons are waiting for the results of the frozen section. Most pathologists would consider fewer frozen sections—with better patient outcomes—to be an improvement in patient care.
“It’s imperative that the tumor subtype is known at the time of surgery,” Jeroen de Ridder, PhD (above), associate professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine at UMC Utrecht and one of the study leaders, told The New York Times. “What we have now uniquely enabled is to allow this very fine-grained, robust, detailed diagnosis to be performed already during the surgery. It can figure out itself what it’s looking at and make a robust classification,” he added. How this discovery affects the role of anatomic pathologists and pathology laboratories during cancer surgeries remains to be seen. (Photo copyright: UMC Utrecht.)
Rapid DNA Sequencing Impacts Brain Tumor Surgeries
The UMC Utrecht scientists employed Oxford Nanopore’s “real-time DNA sequencing technology to address the challenges posed by central nervous system (CNS) tumors, one of the most lethal type of tumor, especially among children,” according to an Oxford Nanopore news release.
The researchers called their new machine learning AI application the “Sturgeon.”
According to The New York Times, “The new method uses a faster genetic sequencing technique and applies it only to a small slice of the cellular genome, allowing it to return results before a surgeon has started operating on the edges of a tumor.”
Jeroen de Ridder, PhD, an associate professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine at UMC Utrecht, told The New York Times that Sturgeon is “powerful enough to deliver a diagnosis with sparse genetic data, akin to someone recognizing an image based on only 1% of its pixels, and from an unknown portion of the image.” Ridder is also a principal investigator at the Oncode Institute, an independent research center in the Netherlands.
The researchers tested Sturgeon during 25 live brain surgeries and compared the results to an anatomic pathologist’s standard method of microscope tissue examination. “The new approach delivered 18 correct diagnoses and failed to reach the needed confidence threshold in the other seven cases. It turned around its diagnoses in less than 90 minutes, the study reported—short enough for it to inform decisions during an operation,” The New York Times reported.
But there were issues. Where the minute samples contain healthy brain tissue, identifying an adequate number of tumor markers could become problematic. Under those conditions, surgeons can ask an anatomic pathologist to “flag the [tissue samples] with the most tumor for sequencing, said PhD candidate Marc Pagès-Gallego, a bioinformatician at UMC Utrecht and a co-author of the study,” The New York Times noted.
“Implementation itself is less straightforward than often suggested,” Sebastian Brandner, MD, a professor of neuropathology at University College London, told The Times. “Sequencing and classifying tumor cells often still required significant expertise in bioinformatics as well as workers who are able to run, troubleshoot, and repair the technology,” he added.
“Brain tumors are also the most well-suited to being classified by the chemical modifications that the new method analyzes; not all cancers can be diagnosed that way,” The Times pointed out.
Thus, the research continues. The new method is being applied to other surgical samples as well. The study authors said other facilities are utilizing the method on their own surgical tissue samples, “suggesting that it can work in other people’s hands.” But more work is needed, The Times reported.
UMC Utrecht Researchers Receive Hanarth Grant
To expand their research into the Sturgeon’s capabilities, the UMC Utrecht research team recently received funds from the Hanarth Fonds, which was founded in 2018 to “promote and enhance the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of patients with cancer,” according to the organization’s website.
The researchers will investigate ways the Sturgeon AI algorithm can be used to identify tumors of the central nervous system during surgery, a UMC Utrecht news release states. These type of tumors, according to the researchers, are difficult to examine without surgery.
“This poses a challenge for neurosurgeons. They have to operate on a tumor without knowing what type of tumor it is. As a result, there is a chance that the patient will need another operation,” said de Ridder in the news release.
The Sturgeon application solves this problem. It identifies the “exact type of tumor during surgery. This allows the appropriate surgical strategy to be applied immediately,” the news release notes.
The Hanarth funds will enable Jeroen and his team to develop a variant of the Sturgeon that uses “cerebrospinal fluid instead of (part of) the tumor. This will allow the type of tumor to be determined already before surgery. The main challenge is that cerebrospinal fluid contains a mixture of tumor and normal DNA. AI models will be trained to take this into account.”
The UMC Utrecht scientists’ breakthrough is another example of how organizations and research groups are working to shorten time to answer, compared to standard anatomic pathology methods. They are combining developing technologies in ways that achieve these goals.
New biomarker may lead to new clinical laboratory testing and treatments for long COVID
Researchers studying long COVID at the University Hospital of Zurich (UZH) and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), both in Switzerland, have discovered a protein biomarker in blood that indicates a component of the body’s innate immune system—called the complement system—remains active in some individuals long after the infection has run its course. The scientists are hopeful that further studies may provide clinical laboratories with a definitive test for long COVID, and pharma companies with a path to develop therapeutic drugs to treat it.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, a subset of the population worldwide continues to experience lingering symptoms even after the acute phase of the illness has passed. Patients with long COVID experience symptoms for weeks, even months after the initial viral infection has subsided. And because these symptoms can resemble other illnesses, long COVID is difficult to diagnose.
This new biomarker may lead to new clinical laboratory diagnostic blood tests for long COVID, and to a greater understanding of why long COVID affects some patients and not others.
“Those long COVID patients used to be like you and me, totally integrated [into] society with a job, social life, and private life,” infectious disease specialist Michelè van Vugt, MD (above), Senior Fellow and Professor at Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), told Medical News Today. “After their COVID infection, for some of them, nothing was left because of their extreme fatigue. And this happened not only in one patient but many more—too many for only [a] psychological cause.” Clinical laboratories continue to perform tests on patients experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 even after the acute illness has passed. (Photo copyright: AIGHD.)
Role of the Complement System
To complete their study, the Swiss scientists monitored 113 patients who were confirmed through a reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) test to have COVID-19. The study also included 39 healthy control patients who were not infected.
The researchers examined 6,596 proteins in 268 blood samples collected when the sick patients were at an acute stage of the virus, and then again six months after the infection. They found that 40 of the patients who were sick with COVID-19 eventually developed symptoms of long COVID. Those 40 patients all had a group of proteins in their blood showing that the complement system of their immune system was still elevated even after recovering from the virus.
“Complement is an arm of the immune system that ‘complements’ the action of the other arms,” Amesh Adalja, MD, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Prevention, “Activities that it performs range from literally attacking the cell membranes of a pathogen to summoning the cells of other immune systems to the site of infection.”
In addition to helping bodies heal from injury and illness, the complement immune system also activates inflammation in the body—and if the complement system is activated for too long the patient is at risk for autoimmune disease and other inflammatory conditions.
Conducted by genetic scientists at Trinity College Dublin and St. James’ Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, the study “analyzed blood samples—specifically, serum and plasma—from 76 patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 in March or April 2020, along with those from 25 people taken before the pandemic. The researchers discovered that people who said they had brain fog had higher levels of a protein in their blood called S100β [a calcium-binding protein] than people who didn’t have brain fog,” Prevention reported.
“S100β is made by cells in the brain and isn’t normally found in the blood. That suggests that the patients had a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier, which blocks certain substances from getting to the brain and spinal cord, the researchers noted,” Prevention reported.
“The scientists then did MRI scans with dye of 22 people with long COVID (11 of them who reported having brain fog), along with 10 people who recovered from COVID-19. They found that long COVID patients who had brain fog had signs of a leaky blood-brain barrier,” Prevention noted.
“This leakiness likely disrupts the integrity of neurons in the brain by shifting the delicate balance of materials moving into and out of the brain,” Matthew Campbell, PhD, Professor and Head of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, told Prevention.
Interactions with Other Viruses
According to Medical News Today, the Swiss study results also suggest that long COVID symptoms could appear because of the reactivation of a previous herpesvirus infection. The patients in the study showed increased antibodies against cytomegalovirus, a virus that half of all Americans have contracted by age 40.
The link between long COVID and these other viruses could be key to developing treatment for those suffering with both illnesses. The antiviral treatments used for the herpesvirus could potentially help treat long COVID symptoms as well, according to Medical News Today.
“Millions of people across the planet have long COVID or will develop it,” Thomas Russo MD, Professor and Chief of Infectious Disease at the University at Buffalo in New York, told Prevention. “It’s going to be the next major phase of this pandemic. If we don’t learn to diagnose and manage this, we are going to have many people with complications that impact their lives for the long term.”
Long COVID won’t be going away any time soon, much like the COVID-19 coronavirus. But these two studies may lead to more effective clinical laboratory testing, diagnoses, and treatments for millions of people suffering from the debilitating condition.
