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Comment by mwint | Hacker News Reader

> The upshot: There may be no correlation between the severity of your COVID case and the lasting effect on your brain.

The simplest explanation here is that there’s also no correlation between COVID and “Long Covid”

But there is a correlation, that's the point of the article, isn't it? :-)

The article presents zero real evidence to show that Long Covid is more than what would be expected from all the confounding factors as a result of the pandemic more broadly (anxiety, lack of social contact, losing a job, being stuck inside and not exercising for an entire year, constant FUD, psychosomatic symptoms from reading about Long Covid being a big thing, etc.).

I and many others don't doubt that Long Covid is real for some people, but the degree to which it's supposedly presenting (30% of infections claimed in this article) seems really odd without some kind of controlled study. I'd like to see something comparing Long Covid rates in people whose lives were minimally impacted by the pandemic (if such people exist - maybe in countries that didn't lock down?) to those whose lives were significantly impacted.

Long Covid is basically the same as ME/CFS which is also real and existed prior to the pandemic.

That's kind of the point. ME/CFS is poorly understood and likely has many causes not directly stemming from viral illnesses. If it existed prior to Covid in seemingly large numbers, it seems pretty likely that people with pre-existing ME/CFS have now decided it's Long Covid, or that the same poorly defined causes have now impacted more people.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, many LongCovid cohorts are finding that 30% of them have hEDS which is technically considered rare (1/5000) but is actually not rare somewhere between 2% and 1% of general population. Many of those people would have got ME/CFS anyway from some other cause. Also because it’s indistinguishable and there is a stigma attached to ME/CFS many people are claiming to have LongCovid instead. In my view the only difference is the quantity of afflicted people is much higher.

I read one study that compared brains scans of people before and after covid and found brain damage. I don't recall it but maybe you want to dig it up on Google.

I think you mean this one? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00503-x

The effect is basically non-existent in people under age 55. And I'd love to see them do a follow-up study since the scans were done fairly soon after infection recovery whereas there's decent evidence that for some people full recovery might take many months.

Sure, it needs to be studied more. But it's not encouraging.

I have a strong feeling a large amount of “long covid” may be the collective anxiety and stress combined with a reduction in social interaction

There's also a strong correlation between the demographics of those who tend to have higher rates of mental illness and those who tend to suffer more from long covid.

Can you point out where I can this data point in the article? I must have missed it.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/980527

“ In an analysis of almost 55,000 adult participants in three ongoing studies, having depression, anxiety, worry, perceived stress, or loneliness early in the pandemic, before SARS-CoV-2 infection, was associated with a 50% increased risk for developing long COVID”

According to this article, rates of depression during COVID outbreak, were 27.5%. So, at least a decent chance this happens by chance? Also they mention worry, perceived stress and loneliness. Did anyone not perceive stress during the pandemic? 50% seems like a pretty low correlation. I can’t read your article because it’s login walled.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/depression-rates-tripled-wh...

No, it was 50% off those that experienced that BEFORE covid - so it was controlled

Right but 50% of people who had long COVID had experienced “worry, perceived stress, or loneliness” in the past ( not ti mention depression/anxiety) I’d expect that number to be much higher.

> Right but 50% of people who had long COVID had experienced

Read more carefully that isn't what the paper showed - it showed that those with previous psychological problems were 50% more likely to have long covid COMPARED to those that didn't have previous problems

I feel that my skepticism of much of the COVID hysteria, whether actually well-founded or not, helped me avoid a lot of this anxiety and stress over the past couple of years.

I took advantage of a nearly 2-year paid "work from home" vacation, and did a lot of other things I probably would not have done otherwise, including joining a gym and getting myself in shape for the first time in my life, and making some new friends.

It can’t have been good for people who are already anxiety-prone or otherwise have mental health issues to be subjected to two years of “going outside will kill everyone you love”.

It's not. The most common mix of symptoms track closely timing wise post covid onset and do not overlap in general with anxiety and stress symptoms. For example chills, exercise intolerance, difficulty breathing after eating, visual snow, tinnitus.

Im not saying long covid doesn’t exist. Only that it is going to be really fun to figure out what it is when a lot of people think they have it.

All of those symptoms seem like they could be stress induced to me at any rate. If you find any reviewed studies let me know.

Personally I find it odd how confidently you are in your assumptions in an area you state you are uninformed about. It's harmful to perpetuate the perception that long covid sufferers are simply stressed out.

Also exercise intolerance is definitely not a stress symptom, exercise is often recommended as remedy for stress. Yet this is one of the most common long covid symptoms.

Anytime there is a new disorder it is completely neglected in science as long as possible despite real suffers being denied real treatment and acknowledgement for a very long time.

Thing is, there are lots of things that are completely neglected by science and only some of them are new disorders.

It’s a threshold for a genetic predisposition, once you’re past the threshold it’s a crapshoot for how bad it gets.

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