As we learn more about the pathogenesis of Long COVID, the presence of an autoimmune process appears to be a prevailing mechanism in how the condition manifests.

The following video goes through some of the research on this subject, why autoimmunity may have occurred in some individuals in response to viral infection and vaccine administration, in addition to concepts surrounding autoimmunity in general.

0:00
One of the main mechanisms that’s theorised to be underlying in the process of long COVID is that of autoimmunity. Now, what’s been shown in the research is that there is a higher correlation of autoantibodies present within those with long COVID. As research comes out, this theory has become more and more prevalent, with more studies showing how the patients with long COVID get the onset of latent autoimmunity in around 80% of cases of long COVID, or poly autoimmune processes in around 60. So this has led on to researchers naming SARS-COV-2 as one of the autoimmune inducing viruses along with Epstein Barr and Herpes Type 6. In this video, we’re going to go through a little bit more about why this virus may have led to the onset of autoimmune disease within long COVID and what things may be potentially contributing to that.

1:09
So research has demonstrated that we can develop autoimmune processes in relation to SARS-COV-2 with a cross reaction between the spike protein of the virus as well as our own bodily tissues. So some research has shown that antibodies against the spike can react with around 28 different tissue types of 53 samples.

1:37
So there’s obviously a huge amount of cross reactivity that can occur with this, with this virus and the antibodies that develop from that. So the types of tissue that seems to have been shown to be reactive with the antibodies can be very various from everything from barrier proteins, and this may explain why people will develop things like brain fog and leaky gut. So we need barrier proteins as part of our barrier systems in the body. So the blood brain barrier, the gut, the gut lining. So if we’re getting antibody production against these barrier proteins, we get a break down of these barriers so that things can get through which shouldn’t do, and that further sets off the immune system reaction. So we get neuro inflammation processes happening in the brain.

2:33
Other things include thyroid, the skin, the liver, muscle and nervous system, the nervous system itself, amongst you know, many other different things. So we can see how this has the potential to have such a widespread effect on the body, and may explain the widespread symptoms that we typically get within long COVID. It’s such a systemic condition. And we can see how this can be one plausible mechanism for how that comes around. You know, and we’re all going to develop our own manifestations of this depending on our genetics and our predispositions. However, there’s a lot going on here.

3:28
So what do we know about autoimmune disease? What we know about autoimmune disease it is very unlikely that it just results from just one single standoff event. So from just one infection, or just one vaccine administration, is very unlikely to set off a whole autoimmune process. Typically, these things occur with the contribution of multiple different factors over time, over years and years of adding more and more strains upon the system, until we get this breakdown in tolerance. And this is the essential part of autoimmune disease, it’s a breakdown of tolerance from our immune system. So it becomes more hyper reactive, hyper inflammatory, and it doesn’t switch off again. So the breakdown in tolerance is a critical point.

4:28
And this tolerance of the immune system is a scale. So we don’t break down and tolerance all of a sudden in one go, it happens over time and we build up this process happening. So typically, what we need to see for this to happen is increases in inflammatory cytokines like IL-6, and other things, and a decrease in what we call T reg cells which are, as the name implies, regulates and balances our immune system. And when we develop this, this leads to this breakdown in tolerance, we get all the reactions and reactions to things that we shouldn’t be reacting to.

5:14
So what’s likely to be happening in the long COVID autoimmune picture is that things have been contributing to this whole process for a while. There’s most likely to be contributing factors over time before you’ve got the infection or vaccine, which have led to pre-existing immune dysfunction. And then the vaccine and infection are the last triggering event for that. What we know about COVID-19 the disease or the problems and complications we get from a SARS-COV-2 infection is that it’s not so much about the virus, it’s more the problem with the immune response to it. When we get too much of an inappropriate response to the virus, that’s when we get the complications. So it’s more about our immune system, how its functioning, and that is affected by all our lifestyle factors, our diet, our environments, all these things have a factor in how our immune system functions and responds to inflammatory triggers like this.

6:19
So typically, the things that will contribute to this whole picture are things such as toxins. Now I’ve said this in quite a few videos now that a lot of the long COVID population that are coming to us for help, what we’re finding with them is that they have exposure to mould and living in mouldy environments, they have the mycotoxin exposure in them. And that’s been demonstrated to have a significant impact on our immune system. We’re also seeing heavy metal issues. So as we develop more toxins and accumulate more toxins in the body, that’s going to affect how our immune system responds to something like this. And what we know about our world, our modern world, it’s becoming more and more and more toxic. We’re all surrounded and inundated by toxins on a daily basis now, and is more than likely that we’re getting more and more health issues because of this factor. So what we found is as we get people away from these toxins and start to help them detoxify, get them out of the mouldy environment, funnily enough, they do a lot better. Their energy picks up, their chronic fatigue symptoms start to decrease, the MCAS symptoms start to get better.

7:46
Other things that will contribute to this are underlying infections, or infection is quite a strong word, so, you know, underlying bugs – other types of organisms that are existing within the body and interacting with us whether it’s in the gut, around the skin, in these reservoirs of microorganisms, organisms within us. So there’s a few parts to this. So what we know as well is part of the long COVID picture is that EBV and pre-existing infections from Herpes type virus

8:28
can contribute to long COVID. That’s one of the main theories, or another main theory, is that with the SARS-COV-2 infection, it overwhelms our immune system, these dormant pathogens are allowed to wake up and start putting additional load on the system. And typically viruses like this, they really clog up our mitochondria, they clog up our energy production system. So if you have reawakened reactivated EBV or HSV-6, that’s a typically a very relevant factor within your condition. These two as well, are really associated with a lot of other autoimmune conditions. So they’ve been associated with Lupus, with Autoimmune Thyroid Disease, with MS.. Many of these other autoimmune things they have been indicated in the process of that.

9:30
And another part of this that I particularly seen in practice as well is that alot of the long COVID population have an underlying high load of yeast or candida, typically within the gut. And what we know about Candida is that it’s, you know, opportunistic, so when we have a high sugar environment, we eat too much sugar, like we see most of the people in today’s society, when we take too many antibiotics, we develop more Candida in the body.

10:10
Now Candida can be inflammatory so we can get our immune system responding to candida being in the gut. And it also can increase interleukin 17, which we know about interleukin 17, decreases our T-Reg cells. So especially when we’re going through a period of excessive stress, when we’re overwhelmed, our resilience is decreasing, like all of us have experienced in the last two or three years, we’ll start to see micro organisms like this start to flourish, because our immune system is down, it’s being overwhelmed, it can’t do its job, as well as at protecting us from these things, it will start to see these things flourish. So it’s more likely that we’ll start to see these things playing a role in coming out of the woodwork and interacting with our immune system through this time. And then when we come around to getting an infection, or a vaccine administration, funnily enough, we’re going to respond adversely because we have all this underlying inflammation going on.

11:22
Two more areas of things that will contribute to inflammation and immune system being switched on. And that is food. So we know that food sensitivities can often underlie an autoimmune disease. And that’s because we’ve developed a breakdown of tolerance from our immune system to food. And that typically happens when we develop increase intestinal permeability or leaky gut. So essentially, whole food particles shouldn’t be exposed to our immune system. It only gets exposed to our immune system, when we develop this leaky gut effect so that whole food particles can pass through. And then the immune system starts seeing whole unbroken down parts of food and to the immune system that looks dangerous and like a foreign invading structure. So that’s exactly how we can start developing sensitivities of our immune system to things like gluten, dairy, other things like this.

12:30
So when the food is broken down properly in our digestion, we don’t have this leaky gut effect going on, our immune system doesn’t see the food so it doesn’t react. It’s when we typically get this leaky gut effect that we develop these types of things. So leaky gut will typically happen again, when we’re experiencing lots of stress, when we’re inflammed, when we’re not taking care of ourselves. So, you know, more than likely, many people have developed this type of problem in the last couple of years because of the whole stressful environment that we found the world.

13:04
And so genetics are also going to play a role here as well. So what we understand about autoimmune disease is that we need the genetics which predispose us to autoimmune conditions. So with celiac disease, we need the genetics for that. It is not enough just to be eating gluten, you need the genes set up for that, although around 30 or 40% of us carry the genes for Celiac, so it’s more than just the genes. So we need this interaction of the right genes with the right environmental trigger. So if we use the example of Celiac, we need to be eating gluten. And then we need that environmental trigger to be exposed to our immune system, our immune system needs to see it. So when we develop leaky gut, so the food can pass through the gut wall, get exposed to our immune system in the right genetic predisposition, we can develop autoimmune disease. So genetics are going to play into this whole process.

13:04
And sorry, that was actually one more additional thing. So the last one being stress itself and trauma will particularly contribute to inflammation. And we know stress has been demonstrated and documented to increase levels of pro inflammatory cytokines, tumour necrosis factor, which can really perpetuate the immune system being switched on and loss of tolerance.

14:43
So, what does this all mean for you, if you if you find yourself with this long COVID phenomenon, and potentially autoimmune autoimmunity as part of that process?

14:57
So you know, firstly let’s discuss our management of autoimmune in general, and this is going to impact how you deal with this going forward. So at present within our mainstream system, our management typically for autoimmune processes is that we will prescribe steroid therapy, and that is in order to suppress the immune system. So our management is to try and suppress the immune system to stop it from attacking itself. And that’s generally it. And generally people remain with on this therapy or medication for as long as the condition is around, which is generally a very, very long time. However, the problem with that is that there’s no question and assessment and thinking about why has the immune system lost tolerance? Why is the more autoimmune process happening? You know, is it just because of the presence of Spike protein which is interacting with the immune system, or is that actually many other different contributing factors to this whole phenomenon? You know, this whole thinking of why this happens doesn’t happen within the mainstream. Now, with the functional medicine approach, this is what we want to start thinking about, we are always trying to think about why something has happened. And when we approach this, with this type of thinking, we can start to pick apart what things may be contributing to the whole state of the immune system. And as we start to remove the identified factors, which may be contributing to perpetuating immune activity, we generally start to see people do a lot better.

16:37
Now for you, that might feel a bit overwhelming, because there can be so many different things playing into this. But it also should be quite refreshing and empowering, because there’s actually a lot you can do to try and help the immune system to calm down. You can do a lot with food, you can do a lot with stress, we can identify what chronic infections underlying microbial imbalances are happening, we can clear out the toxins. So while while it is a lot, there is things you can do for this, it’s not just about the spike protein, which may be in the system. Generally, in the vast majority of people, we shouldn’t see persistence of spike protein. So therefore, with people that have gone down this route it is more likely that the immune system has been triggered by the initial infection and spike protein encounter and it’s the immune system that’s remained to switched on.

17:35
There has been a little bit of research coming out to show actually that it has been some spike persistence in the body, which we did a whole other video on, if you want to check that out. But that is very, very low levels and trace amounts of spike doing that. And we’re still unsure whether that is significant or not and causing issues. So if you want to go around navigating on how to improve your health and improve your immune system if you have immune disease, autoimmune disease, you need to start identifying and addressing the contributing factors to that. If you can remove all these contributing factors, it’s more likely that the immune system is going to start calming down again.

18:20
We can also we can almost correlate and compare this to having a cup being full. So you know, we have a cup of capacity of how much we can deal with in our body, how much our immune system can deal with. And maybe some of our cups are a bit smaller than others because of our genetics. But generally, you know, as things start to fill up, our cup will be okay, if they’re within our capacity, but it’s only when we get too much that it starts overflowing and causing problems. So it’s more of a contribution of many different factors. It’s very rarely to be, you know, one single thing. So in order to improve things, we need to try and remove things from the cup so it’s back in our capacity again.

19:15
Another important point is that autoimmunity is a spectrum. So we’re not going to all have the same severity of illness within this. So generally, you’ll have around three levels of an autoimmune process happening.

19:37
So firstly, we’ll have you know, healthy normal, then we can get a stage being what we call silent autoimmunity. And this is when we have you know, there’s evidence of auto antibodies presenty but we’re not getting any damage or any impact on our physiology. It’s not inhibiting things, is not really interacting with what our body is trying to do too much.

20:20
The second one being autoimmune reactivity.

20:32
And in this stage, once we’ve got a little bit worse, is that we have, you know, obviously positive auto antibodies, and we’re starting to get symptoms from that. So it’s starting to interact with what our body is trying to do. Perhaps it’s inhibiting how our thyroid is producing thyroid hormone… We’re getting some reaction, so it’s starting to cause symptoms, but we’re not getting this overwhelming tissue damage. It’s not causing large amounts of destruction and having significant impact there.

21:17
And then the last one, once we’ve got really bad and had a real breakdown in the immune tolerance, so we’re getting really a lot of hyper inflammation going on is, is when we have full blown autoimmune disease. So that’s when we get like a diagnosis for something like Lupus, or Autoimmune Thyroiditis, or MS. When we’ve gone down through this whole spectrum, and we are now getting to this point where we have the autoantibodies, we have the widespread symptoms and getting really significant symptoms, and we’re getting a lot of significant tissue destruction and damage, which also perpetuates an inflammatory process happening. We get a damage to our cells, break down and destruction of our tissues, that’s going to be a huge danger signal to our immune system. So it starts to increase more and more inflammation. And this is typically where we’ll start to see testing being positive, imaging showing up evidence of what we might see on autoimmune processes, like RA we’ll see a lot of things happening in the joints aswel. So we’re seeing evidence of that.

22:33
And this is what we’re seeing with a lot of people is that, within Long COVID, they have positive auto antibodies, but they go to their mainstream GP, they go to the rheumatology department, and a lot of the testing surrounding this, it’s not diagnostic for anything. So they’re sort of stuck in this grey zone of not being having a diagnostic label, and they’re wondering what’s going on with them. And that’s because they just haven’t developed this full blown autoimmune disease yet, where they can be stuck in a box of Lupus or MS or something like this.

23:08
So the problem with our mainstream again, is it typically will not do much and we’ll wait until they’ve got to this point, and then we’ll do something. We’ll start prescribing the steroid therapy, the immune suppressing medication, to try and help this person. And we won’t do anything while they’re in this point. So they might have a positive ANA but it’s not so significantly high. We’ll get other things showing that there’s something going on with the immune system, but it’s not set in the criteria of being diagnostic for something.

23:47
So in functional medicine, again, what we want to avoid is someone actually getting down to this point. We want to try and stop them and stop the progression from happening. And again, that comes from all the things we discussed about what things may be contributing to the immune system being switched on, try and help them with anti inflammatory interventions, to really try and calm the immune system down before they get to this point. Once they get to full blown autoimmune disease, it’s much much harder to reverse and get better.

24:23
So my advice to you is if that you know you have some of this sort of stuff going on is: don’t wait, start trying to do things to help yourself. Don’t wait for the positive diagnostic test. A lot of people like that because it gives them clarification and confidence in knowing what’s going on with them because they get this label, but it’s much more helpful for you if you can not get to that point if you can try and take control of things earlier on.

The information in this video is for educational purposes only and, therefore, is not intended to be used to diagnose or substitute medical advice or treatment. You should always consult your medical doctor if you intend to make changes based on this information and you should never disregard medical advice or cease taking medication because of it.

References:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33584709/ – Reaction of Human Monoclonal Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 Proteins With Tissue Antigens: Implications for Autoimmune Diseases

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8924736/ – Autoimmunity is a hallmark of post-COVID syndrome

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34957554/ – New-onset autoimmune phenomena post-COVID-19 vaccination