Oct. 10, 2023 -- After being infected with COVID-19, people have a much higher risk of getting autoimmune and autoinflammatory connective-tissue disorders like alopecia, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis and vitiligo, according to new research.
Vaccination lowers the risk, says the study from South Korea, which was published in JAMA Network Open.
Researchers looked at information on more than 350,000 COVID-19 patients from between October 2020 and December 2021. They also used a control group of more than 6.1 million people. The average age in both groups was 52. They were split evenly among the sexes.
“Notably, certain disease risks exhibited a positive association with the severity of COVID-19,” the researchers wrote. "Possible associations of COVID-19 with autoimmune diseases… have been suggested, because SARS-CoV-2 appears to perturb self-tolerance and trigger autoimmune reactions via cross-reactivity that may lead to the development of autoimmune diseases.”
COVID-19 patients had “significantly higher risks” of alopecia areata, alopecia totalis, antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated vasculitis, Crohn disease, and sarcoidosis, the University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP reported.
“The risks of alopecia totalis, psoriasis, vitiligo, vasculitis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, adult-onset Still disease, Sjogren syndrome, ankylosing spondylitis, and sarcoidosis were associated with increasing COVID-19 severity,” CIDRAP wrote.
The study’s authors wrote that the findings suggest that autoimmune and autoinflammatory connective tissue disorders may appear after COVID-19 infection, highlighting the potential long-term health effects associated with COVID-19. Long-term management should include evaluating such disorders in patients who had COVID-19.
Some limitations of the study include the primarily adult population and that the sample entirely comprised Asians, thereby limiting the generalizability of these findings to other ethnic groups and adolescents/children, News Medical reported. The researchers could not determine whether some individuals were more susceptible to autoimmunity than others.