A new study from the U.K. suggests that patients with long COVID may have hidden damage to their lungs, only discoverable through a relatively simple scan.
The study, conducted out of Oxford, was a small pilot study and found that the xenon gas scan method can pick up lung abnormalities that aren’t detected under routine scans.
The pilot study examined 11 people who had COVID-19, did not receive care from the hospital and had the long COVID symptom of breathlessness.
The researchers compared xenon gas scans with other lung-function tests in three different groups of people, those with long COVID who were not admitted to the hospital, 12 people who did go to the hospital after testing positive for the virus but didn’t have long COVID, and 13 healthy people.
All of the groups inhaled xenon gas during an MRI scan. The gas behaves similarly to oxygen but is traced visually during scans. This allowed scientists to track how it moved from the lungs and into the bloodstream.
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Scientists found that for most of those with long COVID, the gas transfer into the bloodstream was not as effective as in the healthy group. Those in the group that went to the hospital also had similar abnormalities in their scans.
Because the study is smaller in size, a larger and more detailed analysis is currently being conducted to confirm what scientists have found.
Researchers hope this will help find why those suffering from long COVID commonly have symptoms of breathlessness for months after having the virus.
Still, the paper is a pre-print, as it has not gone through the formal peer-review process.
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