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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration

In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything.

That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems.

It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurological symptoms aren’t real, though I see some other commenters jumping to conclusions.

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You can't for example see ME/CFS or Long Covid neural damage on a typical MRI but when you do autopsies you find a host of problems including complete viral RNA and intrusion of the immune system that shouldn't be there. Given the similar presentation of Havana syndrome to ME/CFS it would seem sensible to look for some of the similar markers of vascular brain damage with the process developed there by Jared Younger and we will likely find a similar type of brain abnormalities. Just because it doesn't appear on MRI doesn't mean its the only type of test that can be done to find abnormalities in the brain, there are a lot of possibilities for further tests in similar presentations of symptoms.

Very unrelated but if anyone reading this is dealing with long covid/brain fog related symptoms, try famotidine (pepcid).

What's the justification for this recommendation? I find this really curious since I had some stomach acid issues that started during the pandemic (like, perhaps late 2020) that I assumed were stress related. I don't remember actually getting COVID in that time span (my uni was testing us every 3 days so I would have noticed if I had it around then). My primary care prescribed me famotidine for it in ~2022 which helped for a while. I still take it regularly but I did a 90 run of omeprazole last year.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002239992...

Somebody linked a study showing an effect. For a bit of intuition:

A lot of the negative effects of covid are from our immune response and general long-term swelling and inflammation. Pepcid is a pretty safe histamine blocker, suppressing some of that initial broad-spectrum inflammatory response.

Recently I had a pretty bad poison oak problem, and in addition to the normal things (steroids, antibiotics, ...), the doctor strongly suggested allegra+pepcid for a similar reason.

Related, my gut instinct would be that benadryl would have similar effects on long-covid patients (though that might be hard to test given the induced drowsiness from the drug).

Why?

"However, studies have shown that famotidine is not effective in reducing mortality or improving recovery in COVID-19 patients.[38]" Borrell B (26 April 2020). "New York clinical trial quietly tests heartburn remedy against coronavirus". Science Magazine.

A lot of Long Covid seems to be related to mitochondrial damage. You'd probably be better off getting some creatine (which is commonly available because weightlifters use it) and seeing if that helps. Creatine is at least well documented to improve mitochondrial funciton.

Because Mast cell activation syndrome is a common outcome and antihistamines can reduce the impact and gradually calm the gut inflammation process down and quite a lot of Long Covid patients feel better on it.

I'm specifically referring to long covid neurological symptoms like brain fog. Not hospitalization rates, mortality, or whatever measure of recovery most studies of severe patients would be concerned with.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10229204/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7786260/

I have heard you can see long Covid on an MRI. There will be more papers on it in the future

You can be scanned every way with different frequencies or methods and still not find a cause for migraines. Then find it can be stress, referred pain, or many other things.

Use the medicines to fix many issues and the mechanism for its action is unknown yet produces a positive outcome. This affected a handful of people yet gets a lot of attention like shark attacks versus drowning.

Any topics that are outside of the programming space are getting significantly worse for comments to where it’s becoming a waste of time to refute them or even acknowledge that they are trolls.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

It's a pithy saying, but misused here.

Not bothering to look into it would be "absence of evidence".

Extensive looking into it and finding nothing much across many different people and many different scans by many different researchers is a form of evidence.

Evidence we are not good at finding brain abnormalities.

We can actually do a very good job at detecting damage to very tiny structures in the brain. The only problem is the brain needs to be removed from the patient and then sliced very thinly before it can be imaged.

Or just evidence that there were none in this case.

If a bunch of scientists and astronomers directed their best instruments at finding a teacup orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mercury because a small number of people insisted it was there, but never locate it, the more reasonable conclusion wouldn't be that we're not good at finding orbiting teacups. It would be that assertions of its existence were based on bad reasoning.

This is a cop out argument in my opinion because you can never prove a negative. This is just more FUD. You can just always make this argument even if all evidence points to the contrary. "Well you just haven't found the right evidence yet." Right....

Yes, this argument only works when there is no study of any kind. After a lot of research, a lack of evidence points to a lack of existence.

You can believe on your pet conspiracy theory, however the fact is that there is no evidence these people were affected by anything real.

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