January 29, 2022

New preprint from the EXPLAIN project which looks at breathlessness in hospitalised and non-hospitalised people experiencing ‘Long COVID’

The EXPLAIN project seeks to diagnose ongoing breathlessness in coronavirus patients who were not admitted to hospital, using MRI scans to trace inhaled gas moving into and out of the lungs to assess disease severity and whether breathlessness improves over time.

Early work from the team using hyperpolarised xenon MRI in patients following hospitalisation with COVID-19 pneumonia found that that their lungs may be damaged even when all other tests were normal. A new pilot study from the project looks at the lungs of patients who were not hospitalised but are suffering from ‘Long COVID’.

Please note this data is a preprint, so it is early work that has not yet been through peer-review and is not published in a journal.

Journalists dialled in to this briefing to hear the authors present their work and answer any questions.

Speakers included:

Prof Fergus Gleeson, Professor of Radiology, University of Oxford & CI on the EXPLAIN2 study

Prof Jim Wild, Professor of Magnetic Resonance Physics, University of Sheffield

Dr Helen Davies, Consultant Physician, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board

Dr Emily Fraser, Consultant Physician, Oxford University Hospitals