Catching COVID-19 may raise the risk of developing autoimmune disease by 43% in the months following the infection, according to the largest study of its kind. “The impact of this study is huge — it’s the strongest evidence so far answering this question of COVID-19 and autoimmune disease risk,” said Anuradhaa Subramanian (opens in new tab), a research fellow in health informatics at the University of Birmingham, who was not involved in the study.
The new research, which has yet to be peer reviewed, was posted Jan. 26 in the preprint database medRxiv (opens in new tab). Scientists previously linked COVID-19 to an increased risk of autoimmune disease, in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy parts of the body. However, this research was limited to small studies that focused on just a few conditions, such as autoimmune hemolytic anemia, which affects red blood cells, and Guillain-Barre syndrome, which affects nerve cells.
Now, researchers have analyzed the health records of 640,000 people in Germany who caught COVID-19 in 2020 and 1.5 million people who didn’t knowingly catch the coronavirus that year to explore how the infection might affect the risk of developing any of 30 autoimmune conditions. They examined the rate at which people were newly diagnosed with autoimmune diseases in the three to 15 months after they tested positive for COVID-19. They compared these rates to those of the people who hadn’t caught COVID-19. Roughly 10% of the participants in each group had preexisting autoimmune diseases.
Editor’s Note: Yet again, we see ‘covid’ the alleged virus being blamed for ‘auto-immune’ diseases. The study goes to far to link ‘covid’ to Guillain-Barré syndrome which is a neurological disease and a side effect from the flu vaccine that happened in the 1970’s. The alleged Swine Flu pandemic forced the resignation of CDC Director David Sensor for pushing a vaccine that was known to have adverse side effects. — mmd