RECOVER Research Update: November 2024

RECOVER researchers regularly publish their findings in scientific journals. These publications help the scientific community learn about RECOVER studies and the progress they’re making to understand, diagnose, prevent, and treat Long COVID.

The six publications featured in this update show how RECOVER researchers are taking many different approaches to answer important questions about Long COVID. Click on the publication links below to learn more about each study.

Measurement of circulating viral antigens post-SARS-CoV-2 infection in a multicohort study (Clinical Microbiology and Infection, September 2024)

• Previous research suggests that viral persistence (when SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that causes COVID-19, stays in the body) could be one of the causes of Long COVID in some people.
• Researchers found that parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called antigens can stay in the blood for up to 14 months after infection. Although researchers found these antigens in the blood of people with and without Long COVID, people with Long COVID were almost twice as likely to have these antigens in their blood.
• These findings highlight the need for more studies to understand what causes SARS-CoV-2 to stay in the body, which parts of the body – from organs like the heart and brain to specific cells – are most affected when this occurs, and whether treatments targeting viral persistence could be effective for some people with Long COVID.

Read what NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli has to say about the importance of these findings.

Post-acute sequelae of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) after infection during pregnancy (Obstetrics & Gynecology, September 2024)

• Researchers found that Long COVID may be less common among pregnant people than among adults who are not pregnant.
• The most common Long COVID symptoms reported by pregnant people in the study were feeling very tired (especially after exercising), stomach pain, and brain fog (difficulty concentrating, thinking clearly, or remembering things).
• Comparing the Long COVID experiences of pregnant and nonpregnant people could help researchers make more progress toward fully understanding how changes in the body can cause Long COVID.

Pediatric nirmatrelvir/ritonavir prescribing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hospital Pediatrics, August 2024)

• Researchers examined over 20,000 electronic health records (EHRs) to understand whether some adolescents with COVID-19 (aged 12-17 years) were more likely to receive a prescription for nirmatrelvir/ritonavir, an antiviral drug also known as Paxlovid.
• Researchers found that very few adolescents in the study received a Paxlovid prescription within 5 days of being diagnosed with COVID-19. Adolescents with other long-lasting (chronic) conditions were more likely to receive a Paxlovid prescription.
• These findings highlight the need for more research into how effective Paxlovid is at protecting children from COVID-19 and its long-term effects, including Long COVID.

Finding Long-COVID: Temporal topic modeling of electronic health records from the N3C and RECOVER programs (NPJ Digital Medicine, October 2024)

• Long COVID can be difficult to diagnose because people can experience symptoms that affect different parts of the body. Moreover, these symptoms can change over time.
• Using an advanced computer program called an algorithm to examine millions of patients’ medical histories, researchers identified hundreds of groups (clusters) of Long COVID symptoms.
• Further study of these clusters could help researchers identify different forms (sub-phenotypes) of Long COVID and understand what causes them.

A case demonstration of the Open Health Natural Language Processing Toolkit from the National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative and the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery programs for a natural language processing system for COVID-19 or postacute sequelae (JMIR Medical Informatics, September 2024)

• Electronic health records (EHRs) can contain important information about Long COVID signs and symptoms.
• This information is not always easy to find in EHRs, especially when the health condition is new and still being defined.
• Researchers found that involving medical experts in the training of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm could help them more quickly gain insights about Long COVID signs and symptoms from large collections of EHRs.

Ethical considerations for enrolling “invested parties” in large-scale clinical studies: Insights from the RECOVER Initiative (Ethics & Human Research, September 2024)

• People who are involved in conducting a study – such as researchers and patient, caregiver, and community representatives – may also want to enroll in that study. The study’s authors describe these people as invested parties.
• Invested parties may have unique contributions to make to a study. However, including them can also raise questions about fairness, privacy, and the trustworthiness of the study’s findings.
• Based on what they learned from working on RECOVER, researchers developed guidelines for safely allowing invested parties to take part in a study.

You can continue to explore RECOVER’s latest discoveries by visiting the Publications page. Here, you can sort publications by date of publication. You can also browse RECOVER publications using the following filters:

• Study type (for example, observational or pathobiology)
• The people taking part in the study (for example, children or adults)
• Study results, or what the researchers learned (for example, the range of symptoms experienced by people with Long COVID)

Each individual publication page features a short description (abstract) as well as a link to the full text of the publication. Some publication pages also feature links to related resources, such as Q&As, videos, and summaries.