Sarcoidosis-related autoimmune inflammation in COVID-19 convalescent patients

Artem Rubinstein; Igor Kudryavtsev; Annа Malkova; Jennet Mammedova; Dmitry Isakov; Irina Isakova-Sivak; Dmitry Kudlay; Anna Starshinova

doi:10.3389/fmed.2023.1271198

Sarcoidosis-related autoimmune inflammation in COVID-19 convalescent patients

Front Med (Lausanne). 2023 Dec 21:10:1271198. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1271198. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Artem Rubinstein^#^{1

2}, Igor Kudryavtsev^#^{1

2

3}, Annа Malkova^#⁴, Jennet Mammedova^#², Dmitry Isakov^#⁵, Irina Isakova-Sivak^#², Dmitry Kudlay^#^{6

7

8}, Anna Starshinova^#¹

Affiliations

¹ Almazov National Medical Research Centre, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
² Institution of Experimental Medicine, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
³ Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia.
⁴ Ariel University Faculty of Natural Sciences, Ariel, Israel.
⁵ First Saint Petersburg State I. Pavlov Medical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
⁶ Institute of Pharmacy, I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (Sechenov University), Moscow, Russia.
⁷ NRC Institute of Immunology, Moscow, Russia.
⁸ Department of Pharmacognosy and Industrial Pharmacy, Faculty of Fundamental Medicine, Moscow, Russia.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Currently, there are a large number of reports about the development of autoimmune conditions after COVID-19. Also, there have been cases of sarcoid-like granulomas in convalescents as a part of the post-COVID-19 syndrome. Since one of the etiological theories of sarcoidosis considers it to be an autoimmune disease, we decided to study changes in the adaptive humoral immune response in sarcoidosis and SARS-CoV-2 infection and to find out whether COVID-19 can provoke the development of sarcoidosis. This review discusses histological changes in lymphoid organs in sarcoidosis and COVID-19, changes in B cell subpopulations, T-follicular helper cells (Tfh), and T-follicular regulatory cells (Tfr), and analyzes various autoantibodies detected in these pathologies. Based on the data studied, we concluded that SARS-CoV-2 infection may cause the development of autoimmune pathologies, in particular contributing to the onset of sarcoidosis in convalescents.

Keywords: B-cell; COVID-19; autoantibodies; autoimmunity; follicular Th; follicular Treg; post-COVID-19 syndrome; sarcoidosis.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Agreement No. 075-15-2022-301) and government funding was obtained from the Almazov National Medical Research Centre of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.