Covid-19: Younger Patients Develop Fewer Neutralising Antibodies, Study Finds

But older patients who had more neutralising antibodies did not recover faster

- R. Prasad

Analysis of blood samples from 175 patients with mild COVID-19 disease who were discharged from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre as on February 26 revealed that about 30% of patients had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies against novel coronavirus (SARSCoV-2). Ten patients had such low levels of neutralising antibodies that these could not be detected, while two patients showed very high levels.

The study threw up another surprise — the plasma of elderly and middle-age patients had significantly higher amount of neutralising antibodies and spike-binding antibodies than young patients. The median age of the patients was 50 years and the median length of hospital stay was 16 days and median disease duration was 21 days.

The study was posted on medRxiv preprint server on April 6. Preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.

Disease duration