The new deadly disease that has emerged among patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is called MIP-C. Discovered by analyzing the clinical data of patients from Yorkshire, the syndome appeared together with the Covid-19 pandemic. Among the most disturbing aspects of this discovery is the fact that the disease can not only be deadly – eight deaths out of sixty cases have been recorded – but that it can also affect those who have had a mild or asymptomatic infection.
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I study
Also called “MDA5 autoimmunity and interstitial pneumonia contemporary with COVID-19″ or MIP-C – by analogy with MIS-C, another autoimmune disease associated with Covid that affects children -, the disease is similar to a rare autoimmune syndrome known as dermatomyositis anti-MDA5 positive, an extremely rare condition in the UK which is usually diagnosed in people from the Far East, especially China and Japan. The study, conducted by an international research team led by scientists from the Departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California – San Diego (United States) and the Department of Rheumatology at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), was was started when Professor Dennis McGonagle of the English university contacted his colleague Pradipta Ghosh after noticing a mysterious increase in cases of anti-MDA5 positive dermatomyositis in 2021, the second year of the Covid pandemic.
The illness
According to experts, MIP-C would be a rare autoimmune, inflammatory and chronic disease, with consequences mainly on the skin, muscles and lungs, which would lead to a rapidly progressive and potentially fatal interstitial lung syndrome. Caused by antibodies that attack an enzyme called MDA5 (Melanoma Differentiation-Associated protein 5), a sensitive RNA receptor capable of detecting the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and other RNA viruses, the disease is closely linked to Covid-19 , which is why researchers immediately suspected an association between the two. As regards the number of cases, specifically it went from 0.4 percent in 2019 to 2.1 percent in 2020, up to 4.8 percent in 2021, and then fell to 1.7 percent in 2022.
Symptoms
In addition to the scars on the lungs – detected in 25 out of 60 cases – the patients analyzed by Professor McGonagle they had rheumatological symptoms such as arthritis, myalgia, and extensive skin rashes. Through a computational model to analyze big data, the scientists found that patients with higher levels of autoimmune reaction to the MDA5 enzyme also had high levels of interleukin-15, a cytokine associated with progressive interstitial lung disease/pulmonary fibrosis. However, not all patients being treated had had a full-blown SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection, i.e. detected with ororinopharyngeal swabs following the onset of symptoms. This is a fact that has led scientists to believe that even a mild Covid-19 infection it would therefore be able to induce a distinct form of anti-MDA5 positive dermatomyositis, which experts have called MIP-C. Unlike the one already known for over half a century, the syndrome triggered by the pandemic pathogen is different “in its rate of progression, mortality and behavior”. According to experts, the new disease has also spread outside the United Kingdom, although specific data is currently lacking.
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