"It is a well-done study [that] does show that some people can improve immune function over time," says Timothy Henrich, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. There are other causes of long COVID While the Nature Communications study builds on previously identified biomarker signatures that predicted the persistence of long COVID symptoms at eight months, Wolfram Ruf, an immunologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center in Mainz, Germany, says other immune markers that have also been linked to long COVID were not taken into consideration in this recent study. For example, the study team didn’t address the overactivation of the "complement" part of the immune system—which protects the body from infection and inflammation—and has been implicated in causing long COVID. Similarly, the team did not assess the abnormal blood clotting or coagulation system, which has also been shown to cause some long COVID symptoms. While 62 percent of the patients in the Australian study also reported improved health during the follow-up period, the rest of the cohort claimed that long COVID was still curbing the quality of life despite an improved inflammation biomarker profile. "We want to be really careful not to dismiss the fact that some people did not recover," says Matthews. This could be because there are other causes of long COVID; the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 virus; reactivation of other dormant viruses; the formation of autoantibodies
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