University of Sassari University in Italy and University of Flinders in Australia revealed a marker of a dangerous form of coronavirus infection, which can lead to the patient’s death. It turned out that the level of serum protein of amyloid in severely ill is becoming anomalously high during the acute response of the body on SARS-COV-2. An article with the results of scientific work is published at the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Briefly about scientific work is told on the website Health Europe.
Experts conducted a metaanalysis of studies from PubMed databases, Web of Science and Scopus, in which the connection between the severity of COVID-19 symptoms, the concentrations of serum protein Amiloid A (SAA) in patients with coronavirus and survival of patients. In total, the meta-analysis included 19 studies in which a total of 5,617 patients with COVID-19 took part. At the same time, 3723 people (49 percent) disease proceeded in light or medium.
When combining research results, it turned out that the SAA concentrations were significantly high in those patients who did not survive or who had a very severe form of COVID-19. The standardized difference between the average (SMD) between the groups of lungs and heavy patients was 1.20 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.91-1.49, which indicates a strong relationship between high SAA values and a severe COVID-19. Scientists also found a link between the level of amyloida and the floor, which can explain the greater vulnerability for the virus in men.
According to scientists, the tracking of SAA, which serves as a sign of severe complications of the disease, may be useful for identifying groups of risk and monitoring the state of patients with coronavirus infection.
It is known that SAA is significantly activated during the response of the acute phase – the general response of the body, developing in response to the selection of cytokines during infection. Normally, the concentration of amyloida is 20-50 milligrams per liter, but it can increase to 1000 times during the first 24-48 hours of response of the acute phase. This is due to the increased production of protein in the liver, which launches in response to such incentives as interferon-gamma, interleukin-1β and -6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF). In turn, SAA enhances inflammation, increasing the synthesis of these incentives and activating other pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are able to cause cytokine storm and other complications at COVID-19.