The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019, etiologically associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has drawn the attention of the medical community to new clinical and fundamental problems in the immunopathology of human diseases. During a detailed analysis of the clinical manifestations and immunopathological disorders in COVID-19, it became apparent that SARS-CoV-2 infection is accompanied by the development of a wide range of extrapulmonary clinical and laboratory disorders, some of which are characteristic of immunoinflammatory rheumatic diseases and other human autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. All this taken together served as a theoretical justification for the repositioning of anti-inflammatory drugs in COVID-19, previously specifically designed for the treatment of immunoinflammatory rheumatic diseases. The prospects for studying the autoimmune mechanisms of COVID-19 and the possibility of anti-inflammatory therapy are discussed.
Keywords: COVID-19; autoimmunity; autoinflammation; immunoinflammatory rheumatic diseases.
© Pleiades Publishing, Ltd. 2022, ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022, Vol. 92, No. 4, pp. 398–403. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2022.Russian Text © The Author(s), 2022, published in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2022, Vol. 92, No. 7, pp. 654–660.