Researchers in the United States and Britain have discovered a new syndrome linked to Covid after joining forces recently to solve a medical mystery.
After almost 90% of Yorkshire’s population was immunized against Covid, specialists at the University of Leeds in the UK began to encounter cases of a very rare autoimmune disease called MDA5 – autoantibody-associated dermatomyositis – in patients who appeared not to have have contracted Covid.
The British patients had severe lung scarring, and some had the rheumatological symptoms—rash, arthritis, muscle pain—that often accompany interstitial lung disease. The researchers were curious to see if there was a link between MDA5-positive dermatomyositis and Covid-19.
“Dermatomyositis is more common in people of Asian descent, particularly Japanese and Chinese,” Dr. Pradipta Ghosh of the UC San Diego School of Medicine explained in a university statement.
However, the team at the University of Leeds in the UK led by rheumatologist Dr. Dennis McGonagle, who specializes in inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, “noted this explosive trend of cases in Caucasians.” Worse, some of these patients progressed rapidly to death.
The two institutions formed a team to investigate whether what they discovered was indeed an entirely new syndrome.
The study began with Dr. McGonagle’s British lab’s detection of autoantibodies to MDA5 – an RNA-sensing enzyme that, among other things, detects Covid-19 and other RNA viruses.
A total of 25 patients out of a group of 60 developed lung scarring, also known as interstitial lung disease. The lung scarring was severe enough that eight people in the group died of progressive fibrosis, Dr. Gosh said. She noted that there are established clinical profiles of MDA5 autoimmune diseases, but the recorded cases were different. The medical team explored the data with the BoNE – Boolean Network Explorer system, a powerful computational framework for extracting useful information from any form of high-capacity data. The researchers found that patients who showed the highest level of MDA5 response also showed high levels of interleukin-15. Read more here
