Achleitner, Martin, Steenblock, Charlotte, Dänhardt, Juliane et al. · Molecular psychiatry · 2023 · DOI
Researchers tested a treatment called therapeutic apheresis (a blood-cleaning procedure) in Long-COVID patients and found that those who improved had significant reductions in harmful immune molecules, fatty substances, and inflammatory markers in their blood. The study also showed that a blood protein called fibrinogen dropped by 70% after treatment, and abnormal blood clumping patterns disappeared. This suggests the treatment may work by removing specific harmful substances from the blood.
This is the first study to identify specific biomarker patterns that correlate with clinical improvement in Long-COVID/post-infectious conditions, potentially enabling objective monitoring of treatment response. For ME/CFS patients, understanding these underlying mechanisms—particularly autoimmunity, lipid abnormalities, and coagulation dysfunction—may open new therapeutic avenues and help predict who will benefit from apheresis treatment.
This study does not prove that therapeutic apheresis causes clinical improvement, only that improvement is associated with biomarker reduction. The abstract does not indicate whether there was a control group, whether patients were blinded, or what the baseline characteristics and sample size were. The study does not establish whether the biomarker changes are responsible for symptom improvement or merely co-occur with it.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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