64% Covid patients formed antibodies during hospital stay: PGI study
Naina Mishra
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, July 2
Researchers from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) have found that the antibody response increases gradually, with a maximum of 81 per cent patients forming antibodies against Covid-19 after 16 days of stay in hospital.
Findings of PGI study
The samples of 103 Covid-19 patients were collected at the PGI during their hospital stay. The presence of antibody (seropositivity) was seen in 64% patients. Of them, 33% developed antibodies within seven days.
The study found that 64 per cent patients had formed antibodies during the hospital stay, while the remaining failed to show antibody response against the viral infection.
Dr Pankaj Malhotra from the Internal Medicine Department, PGI, said: “This does not imply that patients did not develop antibodies at all. Some may have developed antibodies later, but a majority of them (80 per cent) developed antibodies in 16 days of the stay in hospital.”
The maximum antibodies produced increased after 16 days of admission to a hospital with a cut-off index 13.85. This was significantly higher than antibody production at seven days and between 8 and 15 days.
The samples of 103 Covid-19 patients were collected at the PGI during their hospital stay. The presence of antibody (seropositivity) was seen in 64 per cent patients. Of them, 33 per cent developed anitibodies at seven days, 62 per cent between eight and 15 days, and 81 per cent at 16 days from the time of admission to the hospital.
According to the study, Covid-19 had failed to develop antibody response in all patients. The failure to produce antibodies could be due to underlying immunocompromised states. Anemia and disseminated tuberculosis were observed in two of the patients with anti-SARS-CoV-2 negativity in this study.
The study also found that men (65 per cent) showed higher antibody response than women (59 per cent), whereas no difference was observed in seropositivity with respect to the age of the patients. In this study, an almost similar percentage of adults (62 per cent), paediatric (64 per cent) and old patients (64 per cent) were seropositive. Although, the immune responses, in general, are known to differ in different age groups
Patients in the ICU had higher antibody reactivity with 67 per cent positivity as compared to 60 per cent seropositivity in non-ICU patients, which could be due to the high viral load in ICU patients during the initial period.
The antibody production, however, was more in non-ICU patients with the value of 8.78 as compared to ICU patients with a
value of 3.90, which may be due to adequate antibody production in non-ICU patients in an early phase of infection enabling them to control the disease, thereby decreasing the severity, the study noted.
The study was authored by Dr Jyotdeep Kaur and Dr Indu Verma of PGIMER and published in Indian Journal of Clinical Biochemistry.
