Sandra Ekström

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on public health in several aspects, and the disease burden has been substantial across age groups. At times, young adults were claimed to be the “major spreaders" of disease, and recent data from our cohort suggest that post-covid symptoms are common, also in this age group. We plan to perform a new post-pandemic follow-up of young adults in our longitudinal, population-based BAMSE cohort to explore individual and public health consequences of COVID-19. Our deeply phenotyped participants followed from birth will be invited to a new follow-up focusing on recurrent and long-term COVID-19 symptoms, lifestyle and environmental exposure changes during the pandemic, health and disease. Linkage with national health care and infectious disease registers will be done.Using a newly developed device for home sampling of blood, we also propose a new measurement round with serological analyses of SARS-Cov-2 immunity as well as large-scale protein-based biomarker analyses. Together with blood samples collected in BAMSE before and during the pandemic, this will allow for individual-level biomarker trajectory analyses and elucidation of underlying genetic, immunologic factors. Our application thus targets two important aspects in relation to pandemics

long-term impact on lifestyle and health in young adults, and application of large-scale molecular analyses using repeated blood tests sampled by the participants for elucidation of underlying mechanisms.