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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

> PASC was defined as any symptom that developed (or worsened) with the infection and was still present at enrollment, weeks later.

I can’t imagine why their study is controversial, when their study rules out a huge class of cases where symptoms weren’t even noticed until well after infection.

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That's the definition of long covid, no? How can you feel fine, get covid, then feel bad weeks later and call it "long covid"?

It's super super common for people to recover from covid, be okay for a few weeks or even months and then lapse into long covid. In fact, it's relapse-remitting for many people. If you have symptoms of dysautonomia, this can be barely symptomatic until you do something that triggers an exaggerated sympathetic nervous system response.

Of course symptoms can wax and wane, but that's not what the grandparent claimed. They claimed a person would have zero Covid symptoms (and thus be excluded from the trial), which would skew the results.

As per the trial design, if a patient had any symptoms of Covid and a positive Covid test, then they could be included. And despite a battery of tests, there was no physiological difference between those patients and the controls who had never been infected with Covid.

Is Dysautonomia permanent?

I had some symptoms of it two weeks after testing positive but now I'm living under the spectre of a lifelong disablement. Or, I'm overthinking it.

I'm slowly ramping up exercise, my only symptoms are some sleep issues as well as a relatively anxious malaise but there are a lot of life stressors unrelated to the illness I recently recovered from.

No I don’t think it’s permanent - mine seems to be slowly and progressively improving. You almost have to retrain your autonomic nervous system on a step by step basis.

Music to my ears. :-)

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