Researchers discover physical cause of long Covid tiredness
amsterdamumc.org
amsterdamumc.org
*Ahem*, powerhouse of the cell
Jokes aside, this is a terrifying stat: "Although the majority of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus recover within weeks...around one in eight will get long-COVID. Symptoms in patients with long-COVID...include severe cognitive problems (brain fog), fatigue, exercise intolerance, autonomic dysregulation..."
E: changed "we are" to "we might be"
EDIT: I just realised that some people may interpet the comment as saying that long-covid's symptoms are a great thing or something along those lines. I just meant that it would be nice to find such a study. Sorry.
So take the claim with a grain of salt.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...
But that study itself notes:
> People that had their first infection early in the pandemic, though, were also more likely to report multiple COVID-19 infections. For example, in this study the average date of first infection for those with three or more infections was May 2021, compared to September 2021 for those with two infections, and May 2022 for those with one infection. Those infected earlier in the pandemic, before vaccination and the emergence of the Omicron variant were more likely to develop long-term symptoms, but also had more time since their first infection to become infected with COVID-19 again.
This is also all self-reported surveys. That means that they're selecting for people who will self-report questionnaires, which is incredibly highly biased.
Immunologically it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and there's no theoretical foundations for how this could be happening. If its linked to people with susceptible genetics/biology (something like MHC subtype) then long COVID should stabilize affecting only that population. If it is due to autoimmunity then people who have formed healthy immune responses to COVID shouldn't increasingly be susceptible after the initial immune response is formed. Give it a few more years, and I strongly suspect that better studies come out finding that long COVID risks decrease over time (although they probably never go to zero, but it starts to look more like flu/cold risk of ME/CFS and that antibodies to vaccination/prior infection are actually protective, like one would logically expect).
Already the progressive subset of my social media is mostly working on the assumption we are seeing a "rapidly rising, ever-worsening reinfections leading to continuously increasing amount of long covid", but that's not what I'm hearing from the medical subset (in person, off the record, not on social media, because they're tired of the whole social media garbage cycle).
There's this Mandela effect in left-leaning circles which thinks that the messaging started with the early 3-month >90% efficacy-against-infection results from Dec 2020, and they're getting fairly hysterical that we abandoned zero covid, when that actually was never the policy. We just collectively all leaped to that hope with the first round of vaccine results because we wanted the pandemic to just have a simple off switch.
And now that's been twisted up into weird us-vs-them political pathologies where the nominally right-wing antivaxxers are shouting about how the vaccines don't work because they weren't what was "promised" while the left-wing is getting hysterical about giving up on covid eradication.
Most virologists/immunologists/microbiologists are happy that we have vaccines that are 95% efficacious against severe disease/death and that the pandemic is either over or winding down (based on entirely debatable definitions), but this pisses off both different political tribes in different ways.
Protection from vaccines has ranged (IIRC) from none to about 50% reduction in probability
Some covid infections, just like the cold or the flu, cause symptoms longer than the 5-7 days, maybe for 2-3 weeks. That’s long covid. Also remember that long covid symptoms include symptoms like depression and it ends up not being very rigorously defined.
Then there is the version that creates long term chronic fatigue symptoms. That is a much smaller percentage of the population, more like 1% or less. The chances of getting that are extremely small and there’s nothing to be terrified about. You can also get CFS from the flu, and other benign diseases.
Just from looking at the general population it’s easy to see that 1/8 people are not suffering from long covid. Just like how I know someone who got the vaccine and she ended up being crippled by arthritis from the vaccine, but that is not a common side effect at all otherwise we would have seen that more often in the people around us.
That's arguably also terrifying if even common viruses are known to cause long term conditions. Also consider the evidence pointing to a link between viral infection and dementia:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-study-of-500000-medical-recor...
As OP notes, there are certainly some small fraction people with worse outcomes. But the generic "long covid" term has mixed up all sorts of things -- from hospital syndrome (absolutely real! but very rare!) to symptoms that anyone would completely disregard prior to 2020 as "a head cold" (very common!)
Also, of course, there's a ton of motivated reasoning surrounding this topic where people are in forums and comment threads attributing every symptom under the sun to Covid, and dredging up bad observational studies to support their claims. The link to dementia likely falls in this bucket. It's not coincidental that most of the people to get seriously ill with Covid were/are old, and that most of the people who get dementia are...old.
ME / CFS is a horrible disease. My younger brother was out with it for a year but I know several women for whom it has effectively been a life changing condition.
The article I linked to wasn't about covid.
Observational studies don't/can't perfectly correct for this residual confounding. This exact error has been repeatedly made by "long Covid" research as well (most notably by Ziyad Al-Aly, who has published a half dozen different articles on Long Covid using the same confounded, observational VA medical record dataset, and claimed associations with a huge number of different illnesses. This research is garbage, but it has scared people out of their wits.)
wat.
I lost my sense of smell and taste for ~6 months. Was in bed for 1 week, sleeping like 18 hours per day. Some foods still don't taste the same (mostly eggs and chicken).
This was about 2 days after I got the second dose of Moderna's vaccine.
Base rates and coincidences explain many things better than "vaccine caused my <blah>"
Compared to new-onset arthritis from the vaccine - the biggest lit review I can find found 45 confirmed cases across 31 studies. [1] For comparison there are over 730,000 (self reported, admittedly) cases of long covid lasting more than 104 weeks in the UK alone. [2]
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10055862/
[2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Might be worth looking at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7232a3.htm which is more aligned to what this study researched.
(French) https://www.sante.fr/covid-long-2-millions-de-personnes-pres...
1.2% of the French population has long COVID with large/very large impact on daily activities. 4% has long COVID more generally. So I expect more than 1% of chances of getting debilitating symptoms. Though it could be that people with "light" long COVID recover while people with debilitating long COVID don't and make for an unexpectedly high share of the population as they accumulate. (not saying I think that this is the case, just saying this is a possible alternative explanation to "chances of debilitating long COVID are chances of long COVID / 4")
Later diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Sjogrens. Best I can figure, I had Sjogrens before, but it was so mild. I didn’t really notice or care. After the exposure, all the symptoms were amped up 50 fold. Also had Factor V Leiden. Which went from not an issue to multiple clots every single week.
After about four years, the symptoms dad calmed down to certain degree. Getting Covid was a full relapse for about six months.
Of course my wife got the vaccine and her arm swelled up and years later still hasn’t gone back down.
My wife, a formerly energetic, outgoing, type A person, has been suffering from ME/CFS for 20 years. Long COVID symptoms are highly similar to ME/CFS problems, and the hope has been that the long-underfunded ME/CFS research would benefit from the research money that has come with COVID. Thus, I felt let down when I read the linked blurb.
Found the link: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/sars-co...
AFAIK they even attributed the organ failures to the failures in mitocondrial energy production.
If you get ME/CFS you are, quite literally, left to die here. Unless someone in your network looks after you.
So yes.
It never really affected me, as I apparently cared a lot less about smells than many other people, but it is a little frightening to lose something because of a disease. I’m happy it was the only side effect I got, I’d obviously rather have had none, but I’d frankly be comforted by scientists knowing more about it.
I've never heard of such a thing but if so I'm glad there's something to at least try.
I don't personally know anyone who still hasn't regained their sense of smell, but for some it was a year or more before it returned fully.
I do know 2 people with 'long covid' who are just super low energy (not a severe case).
Im just excited it's all being looked into now as opposed to being blown off or labeled misinformation.
[1] https://www.uab.edu/reporter/patient-care/advances/item/1000...
Adenoviruses: Causing Weight Gain and Obesity
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/weight-loss-genetics-obesit...
It hasn’t been confirmed but it seems clear that the initial Covid infection has great impact to the immune system and triggers all sort of collateral effects.
there is also the small matter of... viral persistence
Where is the clarity and consice exacting standards that we are supposed to be in awe of in the scientific community
Why is there no mention of whether or not the test subjects had been vaccinated.
How do we know that the vaccine did not cause the same symptoms?
Surely, only then, could we, I mean I, put this thinking to bed and move on.
For balance and clarity I would like to see the same research done on those who have had the vaccine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38865876 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44432-3
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.09.23298266v...
It isn't these researchers job to distinguish every phenotype of long covid as there are other groups trying to figure that out. When those definitions are clearer, I'm sure more upcoming literature will distinguish that. But for now, the current definition are symptom/observational based as we have no biomarker or means to distinguish post-vaccination / infection based long covid yet.
Because they started after COVID and not vaccination?
Edit: will add https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccination-drama...
Vaccination actually reduces the risk.
Do MORE to stop the spread. COVID is still spreading, disabling, killing. We're almost into year 5 of the pandemic.
It's not good for yourself, your family, or your community.
Please stop saying it is psychosomatic. Please stop saying only unfit people get it. People stop saying it is caused only by the vaccine.
All of these things do nothing helpful. The science will continue to push through these opinions regardless.
Why can't the discussion be focused on the actual finding here which is that we have a much clearer model of what is causing PEM / exercise intolerance in symptomatic long covid patients versus asymptomatic controls via amyloid deposits, mitochondria dysfunction, and muscle structure changes.
Such symptoms occuring are unsurprising given the psychological effect of the pandemic at its height, its societal and economical effects.
Adding to this getting infected and all the fanfare, along with fear mongering we've been subject to via the media and mandates, long covid could alone so easily be caused by the side effects on mental health.
I won't dare claiming most disease have psychological root causes, not a medical professional.
Because he's an obvious hack who's completely full of shit? I always wondered what kind of person would ever have bought those early 1900s "Dr. Amazing's Medicinal Tonic" claims about curing syphillis, headaches, snake bites, cancer, broken bones, and bad breath. I guess I found one?
I had not heard of "the Time Cube guy" before but a quick search brings up a lot of conspiracy theories. However, I don't see what that has to do with Dr. Palmer's Brain Energy theory.
For what it's worth, I hate conspiracy theories. It's intellectual laziness. So, when you said Dr. Palmer's Brain Energy theory is pseudoscience I immediately wanted to know more because I want to be able to disregard it if the facts warrant that.
> which apply to all mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, and even schizophrenia
All mental disorders!? That is not the kind of claim anyone with a real discovery has ever made. Everyone who claims that their discovery could cure everything in that list is a huckster. He's claiming that mitochondrial issues cause everything that can ever go wrong with the brain! He's simply casting aside the possibility that any of these conditions could be caused by any of the dozens of causes that we know are associated with various cognitive decline (even if there isn't a simple causal link to any specific mental disorder):
* Lead, mercury, or other heavy meatal poisoning
* Neurotransmitter deficiencies or reuptake problems
* Infection and auto-immune issues
* Blood flow issues
* Prions
* Cell death from toxic substances (e.g. huffing paint)
* Problems with myelin sheathing
* Problems cleaning junk out of CSF
The list goes on and on. No, screw all that, every other scientist on the planet is wrong: it's just this guy's one thing that he found that causes all mental disorders. Maybe he'd say "ok but lead poisoning is actually damaging the mitochondria, so I'm still right!" but that's at best moving the goal posts, and at worst obviously wrong: toxic metals damage everything. Other scientists have studied lead poisoning, and the main problem seems to be its action on myelin sheathing, not on mitochondria. Most of this stuff has no causal relationship with mitochondrial damage at all. You have to completely disregard almost the entire body of neuroscience to make the claims he's making.
The list of "all mental disorders" is so vast, so complicated, so nuanced, that we can't even agree on what something like schizophrenia even is. We're talking about the brain: the most complicated system in the known universe. It's not all caused by this one guy's pet theory.
Anyone who comes out of the gate with "Einstein was wrong! Perpetual motion machines! The rest of the world is lying!" can be completely ignored. This guy may not be explicitly claiming that every other scientist who studies the brain is wrong, but they are implicitly claiming that.
(Not arguing for the parent idea, just why this illness may be special, from the fear perspective.)
My argument is that the level of fear inducing information surrounding most people on the planet, associated with covid, was nowhere comparable to fear inducing info associated with any disease and their potentially correlated (or not correlated) potential psychological side effects.
By saying this I'm not claiming that long covid is caused by a psychological side effect of a/ having been infected and b/ the information and fear induced state most people fell into and/or c/ other complex compounded side affects of the measures put in place to fight the pandemic: loss of income, job, sense of safety, isolation and containment driving our minds pretty sick
I'm saying it could be hence finding correlation between covid infection and longer than short term symptoms described in many independent observation MAY be a red herring
Last, an over simplified illustration:
- put, furtively some toxine in food and 1000 consume it. - 800, let's say. get sick then recover entirely in the short term.
- put, some toxin in food, followed by massive information campaigns, hammering everyone day in and out of the presence of a toxin in food, then lock everyone up, have 200 lose their job, lose contact with their closed ones, etc etc - 200, let's say, global knowledge some food was contaminated didn't help an ounce to reduce their consumption, get sick. - 20, let's say, don't fully recover short term and are left with what we would call "long toxin consumption syndrome", suffering various side effects.
And we have research insisting they are seeing correlation between a toxin and long term side effects. Ignoring the social, economical and psychological very potential effect/contribution to these longer term symptoms, I find flagrant lack of hollistic view to phenomenon often lacking scientific researchers.
Fair enough?
Your hypothesis doesn't seem super likely, though I'd entertain the theory if there were a study showing a linkage here. But as for your literal question, I don't think anyone supposes you specifically must do anything. After all, what's 1 person out of billions?