For the roughly one in ten people whose bodies never fully recovered from COVID-19, medicine has long offered little more than uncertainty. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have identified something concrete: in long COVID patients, the immune cells designed to fight specific viruses bear the marks of both exhaustion and unusual destructive intensity — a paradox that may help explain why the body remains in a state of unresolved conflict long after the initial infection has passed. The discovery, which points especially toward herpesviruses and shows stronger effects in women, does not
Long COVID linked to exhausted, hyperactive immune cells targeting multiple viruses
Long COVID significantly impacts patients' quality of life, forcing some to leave work and abandon pre-COVID lifestyles due to severe, unpredictable symptoms lasting months or years.