[conspire] Long-term vs. short-term antibodies

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

One of the peculiar things I’ve seen in two papers now, but no one discussing (and I’ve never seen it in other virus outbreaks I was watching closely), is this:

Classically, the body makes IgM antibodies while fighting the infection. Then, when it’s on the mend, it makes IgM and IgG, and eventually makes only IgG. This is one way you can tell a (systemic) infection has cleared the body: the IgM is gone.

With that in mind, in this study, 10 out of 26 COVID-19 patients created IgG antibodies *before* IgM, backwards of the usual.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0897-1/figures/2

So the gotcha here is that you could easily miss an active infection by looking for one and not the other, or by interpreting it in the classical way. I’ll be looking for other similar studies, but this one was definitely unexpected.

I’d be even more interested as to why.

Deirdre
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