A new preprint study followed the same individuals before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection and asked a simple question -
What happens to immune memory after COVID?
Not during acute illness.
Not only in long COVID.
But months later, in people considered recovered.
Jan 4 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Prenatal COVID can shift the trajectory of brain development.
The differences are measurable - and they appear before diagnoses exist.
It’s based on neonatal brain MRI and standardized developmental testing🧵
What study is this?
A prospective study (Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2025)
children exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in utero
brain MRI ~2 weeks after birth
developmental testing at 2 years (Bayley-III, ITSEA)
compared to a pre-pandemic control cohort
Jan 2 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The authors show that COVID-19 can disrupt the heart’s electrical wiring (the cardiac conduction system) -causing bradycardia, pauses, and AV block...🧵
... even when they can’t detect viral proteins in the heart, pointing instead to innate immune signaling (IFN/JAK–STAT) plus mitochondrial oxidative stress (ROS) as the likely drivers.
Jan 2 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A new study (Cell Reports, 2026) raises an uncomfortable question.
Is metformin really immunologically neutral when used outside diabetes?
Metformin is widely discussed beyond diabetes - aging, cancer, infections, even immune modulation.🧵
It’s not just how much protein, but how proteins are chemically modified (oxidation, glycation, etc), shifting them toward pro-coagulant behavior and impaired microcirculation - and different phenotypes (Long COVID vs POTS) show different PTM signatures.
Dec 29, 2025 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Post-COVID brain fog is everywhere - but mechanisms are still debated. This poster asks a clean question - do people with post-COVID brain fog show blood signals consistent with BBB (blood–brain barrier) permeability and immune dysregulation?🧵
Study design. Cross-sectional (one timepoint). 279 participants without prior dementia/cognitive impairment. 51 COV- and 228 COV+. Within COV+, 96 had post-COVID brain fog. 35 had newly diagnosed MCI (= mild cognitive impairment) post-COVID.
Dec 28, 2025 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Your brain has a built-in cleanup system - the glymphatic system. Two recent papers point to the same theme. When this cleanup slows down, sleep and cognition often take the hit - and in Parkinson’s, impaired cleanup may also worsen toxic protein buildup🧵
Think of glymphatics as the brain’s plumbing. CSF (brain fluid) flows along blood vessels, mixes with fluid between cells, and helps wash out metabolic waste. It’s strongly tied to sleep, vessel pulsations, and astrocyte water channels (AQP4).
Dec 27, 2025 • 24 tweets • 3 min read
Long COVID has been treated like a messy pile of symptoms.
This review proposes a cleaner frame - a self-sustaining immune loop - with monocytes/macrophages at the center🧵
That’s the paradigm shift.
Not post-viral damage + anxiety, and not one autoimmune disease for everyone,
but a chronic innate-immune state that can spill into many organs.
Dec 27, 2025 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
COVID doesn’t have to kill neurons to change brain function. It can retune how neurons regulate their messages.🧵
A new PLOS ONE paper shows that SARS-CoV-2 leaves a measurable molecular footprint in the brain - specifically in how neurons process their mRNA
Dec 26, 2025 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
Could COVID affect fertility through immune cross-reactions? This isn’t just online speculation anymore. Researchers are testing it head-on - identifying specific antibodies and checking what they do in living organisms🧵
A new paper in Journal of Autoimmunity builds on a classic idea in immunology - molecular mimicry. Some short stretches of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may resemble parts of human proteins involved in reproduction.
Dec 22, 2025 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
An interesting population-level signal is coming from Barcelona.
Antihistamines, Long COVID and thrombosis🧵
A large real-world preprint analysis (~193,000 people, 2020–2025) suggests that people chronically taking antihistamines had
fewer thrombotic events
and almost no recorded long COVID - even after multiple reinfections.
This is not proof. But it is not noise either.
Dec 22, 2025 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Immunity that once protected us from deadly infections
may now increase the risk of autoimmunity, Long COVID, and chronic inflammation.
A new review explains why🧵
Here’s the paradox.
The strongest genetic risk factors for autoimmune diseases are also some of the oldest immune genes we carry.
If they were purely harmful, evolution would have removed them long ago.
Dec 17, 2025 • 23 tweets • 3 min read
COVID-19 is often described as an inflammatory disease.
But new research shows SARS-CoV-2 goes deeper.
It alters regulatory layers inside cells at the RNA level, weakening antiviral defense from within.🧵
Thanks @NFMai @RWittenbrink
Cells contain long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs).
They don’t make proteins - they act as control hubs, coordinating immune signals, especially interferon (IFN) responses.
Dec 14, 2025 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
Severe COVID-19 leaves behind a long-lasting, systemic, and biologically measurable pro-oncogenic state
that persists for at least one year after infection and may increase cancer risk or worsen cancer prognosis🧵
The authors analyzed long-term changes in gene expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) one year after COVID-19 infection.
Dec 13, 2025 • 22 tweets • 3 min read
COVID-19 is not just an acute event - it is a long-term vascular insult.
This study shows that the risk of ischemic stroke remains elevated for at least four years after SARS-CoV-2 infection.🧵
The risk remains elevated including in people who
were not hospitalized,
had a mild or moderate course,
had no obvious neurological complications during the acute phase.
Dec 12, 2025 • 21 tweets • 3 min read
What a new Nature Immunology study shows about long COVID?
Long COVID is not post-infectious fatigue.
A new study shows that it is a clearly defined biological state =
chronic immune activation, T-cell exhaustion, and metabolic disruption🧵
The study analyzed 142 individuals, including 28 patients with long COVID.
Compared with recovered controls, people with long COVID showed persistent activation of inflammatory pathways lasting more than 180 days after infection.
Dec 12, 2025 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
Can pathological processes continue in the brain without an active virus?
Yes.
The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein on its own can accelerate microglial aging by switching cellular metabolism toward glycolysis, leading to measurable memory impairment🧵
This study shows that the N protein is not biologically neutral.
Even in the absence of viral replication, it is sufficient to trigger long-lasting dysfunction in the brain.
Dec 9, 2025 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
COVID isn’t only about the virus being strong - but about the body’s ability to restore balance being disrupted. So a another direction is emerging -
instead of only studying what the virus does, researchers are looking at how the body’s regulatory systems break down🧵
A recent review shows that SARS-CoV-2 can block the cell’s clean-up system, which normally removes damaged molecules and leftover virus. When this system stalls, viral pieces remain, the immune system stays activated, and inflammation escalates.
Dec 7, 2025 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
A new study mapped how SARS-CoV-2 variants disrupt human biology using a custom tool called BioEnrichPy.
Unlike typical pipelines, it automates the full workflow - data parsing, enrichment (GO/KEGG), stats, visual output🧵
Why this matters.
Variant-specific host interactions are usually analyzed manually - slow, fragmented, and error-prone.
BioEnrichPy standardizes this into a reproducible, scalable process that can handle large interactomes.
Dec 6, 2025 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
A large peer-review study from China (40,537 people, 3 hospitals, 2021–2024) found that a single wave of SARS-CoV-2 infection (Omicron BA.5/BF.7) was followed by a measurable loss of T cells that lasted more than 20 months.
Not a small fluctuation - a durable shift in immunity.🧵
Study headline result.
~10% reduction in CD8+ T cells still present ~20 months after infection.
For an individual - maybe subtle.
For a population -a meaningful shift in antiviral capacity.
Dec 4, 2025 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A large new study published in JAMA Network Open examined 28 million adults in France (ages 18–59) over four years to assess the long-term risk of death after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination🧵
The bottom line - vaccinated individuals had about 25% lower risk of overall death (all-cause mortality) compared with people who never got vaccinated.
