Low cortisol levels and herpes-virus reactivation are associated with prolonged COVID-19 symptoms, preliminary research suggests.
. “A major weakness of this paper is the very small sample size,” says infectious-disease specialist Michael Sneller at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “I would take with a huge grain of salt all these findings unless they are confirmed in larger studies.”
Long COVID consists of a constellation of sometimes debilitating symptoms that last for months or years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.— but researchers have few clues to its causes. Most strikingly, the study found that in the long-COVID group, levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has a role in regulating inflammation, blood sugar levels and sleep cycles, were about 50% lower than in healthy participants. The authors also found hints that in people with long COVID, Epstein–Barr virus, which can cause mononucleosis, and varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles, might recently have been ‘reactivated’.
Another limitation of the study is that Iwasaki’s team did not analyse participants’ samples for the presence of the Epstein–Barr and varicella-zoster viruses, instead measuring levels of antibodies against the viruses.
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