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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

A lot of symptoms of long covid mirror the symptoms of unhealthy living, which may make it so people either dismiss their own symptoms and don't seek diagnosis, or their complaints are dismissed by others for needing to simply improve externalities.

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Couldn’t it be the other way round, that changes in health caused by other external factors erroneously get blamed on COVID?

For instance, a disproportionate amount of long COVID cases are reported by women between the ages of 40 and 60, the exact age range when most women experience menopause [0]. Menopause can cause brain fog, fatigue, and other symptoms that mirror those of long COVID. Since pretty much everyone has had COVID, it’s a basic statistical certainty that many women caught COVID exactly when their menopausal symptoms started (whose onset can be extremely sudden), and falsely causally associate the two. The exact same conflation likely happens in children, who also go through several profound developmental shifts.

[0] https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/28/long-covid-may-actua...

Ah yes, you trust

https://www.newsonhealth.co.uk/

over research from Harvard.

One, maybe two non-research docs or... a team of research docs.

Fine, here's a source where both the second and corresponding authors are from Harvard that says the same thing [0]. That said, you don't need to be from a prestigious institution to observe the basic statistic that long COVID is most frequently reported in women ages 40-60.

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> Couldn’t it be the other way round, that changes in health caused by other external factors erroneously get blamed on COVID?

It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors.

> Menopause can cause brain fog

Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539845

Those patients were 20-59 and had "no previous history of neuropsychiatric disorders."

>It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors.

Didn't mean to imply that all cases are, just that our definition of and knowledge about long COVID is nebulous enough that some nontrivial proportion of cases are likely attributable to external factors.

>Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday

Absolutely, just as other infections can cause severe lingering symptoms [0]. But we don't really know how prevalent these are, nor the severity of the prevalence. Studies like the one you link typically select for the most severe cases. We don't know whether it's useful to generalize from those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-acute_infection_syndrome

You can't see "brain fog" on any imaging scan. That study didn't demonstrate any such causation. At most you can establish a correlation between certain imaging patterns and patient symptoms (which are notoriously noisy for any sort of behavioral health condition).

I went on vacation, had a great time, then got COVID, and came back a completely nonfunctional wreck beset by random adrenaline dumps, heart palpitations, spontaneous panic attacks, and wicked insomnia. The condition lasted almost a year.

39 year old male. I was in great shape both physically and mentally before my trip.

Doctors are at complete a loss to "diagnose" long COVID. There are only a few places which specialize in it, and even then I think they're probably grasping at straws.

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