> Our animal models demonstrate that serotonin levels can be restored and memory impairment reversed by precursor supplementation or SSRI treatment. While the effectiveness of SSRIs in acute COVID-19 has been a subject of debate,69,70,71,72,73,74 no systematic exploration of SSRIs in individuals with PASC has been performed to date. Our study, together with recent findings linking depression with cognitive impairment in Long COVID75 and the effect of SSRIs on vagus nerve activity,67 call for the assessment of targeting serotonin signaling for the prevention or treatment of neurocognitive manifestations.
I’d been suffering from some “depression lite” symptoms, mostly generalized anxiety since 2020, maybe long covid, who knows, and a reasonably small prescription of Xoloft has had a huge change in my mood/life.
That's interesting - did the psychiatrist explained it like that ? I feel the same way for so many months, but also wouldn't call depressed. Just always anxious, never rested, always in a mood... I attribute to work and other stresses though.
I think it makes a lot of sense tbh if one demographic lies more often. But if I know more about them than demographic, I use that info too. For example,
There was a study on this by okcupid where they found 80% of white women who claimed they were bisexual only matched with one sex. The percentage was lower for other races.
It's astrology (the white woman "science") all over again, except this time for mental illnesses.
why folks think long covid isn’t real? Most disease have long lasting effects. Why not covid?
Without endorsing this one way or another: that's precisely the argument. There does exist a general "post viral syndrome". Since that is already known, why jump to the conclusion that a separate post-covid syndrome exists, as opposed to this just being another example of the same?
That might turn out to be a pivotal argument. But as it is, it proves too much: it denies the existence of a general post-viral syndrome. Since we do know that viruses, as a general phenomenon, can lead to effects like what are being reported, the default assumption ought to be that this is just one more such example. From there, researchers could attempt to show that this is (or is not) qualitatively different.
Skipping a known likely cause to search for something more specific seems like a potentially much more difficult path, and by pursuing it this way it also seems likely to miss out on the possibility of helping those suffering from post-viral syndrome that's not connected to covid.
Post-acute infection syndromes (PAIS) is an umbrella term. Many fall under this. Long flu(not new, but new research suggests the phenomenon based on long covid research), long rsv(not new, just more recognized when kids get it and develop asthma later in life), long covid, etc. Larger list here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01810-6/tables/1
Researchers are actively pursuing PAIS and the research being done for long covid is making breakthroughs in PAIS and PAIS populations like ME/CFS. It has become so prevalent that this year there have been multiple centers focusing on it. EX:
Nobody is skipping likely causes, if anything we are driving forward today on hypotheses that could help all PAIS (i.e. viral persistence, autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, reactivation of latent viruses).
Just ignore them. These nutjobs are made not believing in covid the entire personality so that they could feel smart, and now they have to cling to that belief instead of accepting reality
There's a vast difference between denying the very existence of COVID-19 and skepticism of long-COVID. Nobody doubts the existence of Lyme disease. The existence of Chronic Lyme disease is generally rejected.
There will always be people out there that will never believe in things that seem rational. Covid has been the subject of misinformation on all sides for years and will take decades to clear up, if ever.
What's puzzling is that everyone know that influenza can have long lasting effect.
Even the 'no mask, no vaccine' crowd agree that Covid is at least an aggressive and more contagious influenza (and some even agree that the first variants were worse)
You will still have people denying long-lasting covid damage.
I mean. Viruses cause lasting damages to a small percentage of people. Covid-19 is a virus.
Well I got COVID over a year ago and still have negative effects every day. Went to the doctor multiple times and they said I'm ok, I don't think they tested enough or looked at the right things. It's one of the worst things that's happened to me. I'm only in my 20s.
My gut reaction (pun intended) or guess on what causes Long Covid is a viral reservoir, possibly in the gut, that the immune system cannot fully clear. Low serotonin is then a downstream effect from the chronic stress on the body. Approx. 90% of serotonin found in the human body is located in the (GI) tract. So people and doctors will throw SSRIs at the problem, and maybe that will relieve some symptoms, but will not address the fundamental cause. Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10171832/
In that case, a gastrointestinal lavage (as applied before a colonoscopy) could be a potential remedy. It's a long shot, but since the process doesn't have any side effects (other than the inconvenience of having to change your diet for a few days), it'd be worth a try.
> So people and doctors will throw SSRIs at the problem, and maybe that will relieve some symptoms, but will not address the fundamental cause.
Additionally, SSRIs cause severe - and in many cases permanent - side effects. What's worse, we don't even really know how SSRIs work - or if at all (at least, as intended). Nevertheless, they're handed out like sweets.
Additional potential long-term side effects include, but are not limited to, weight gain, feeling emotionally numb, and an increased suicided risk. Furthermore, there's the SSRI discontinuation syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressant_discontinuation...
To add to this, a tiny one-sentence note about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction is actually buried in the prescribing information for Prozac. It’s not just something on Wikipedia, it’s a known issue in the mainstream medical community (albeit maybe not as widely known or discussed as it should be).
Half of the side effects are also the side effects of abating depressions.
It's theorized that the suicide risk from most anti-depressants are from transitioning from so depressed that you have no motivation to do anything, to having enough motivation, but still feeling the related pain from depression.
Likewise with weight-gain. For many depressed people they have a suppression of appetite, and relieving the depression causes return of appetite.
AFAIK, neither the sexual side effects nor the withdraw symptoms are generally considered to be long term much less permanent.
AFAIK, neither the sexual side effects nor the withdraw symptoms are generally considered to be long term much less permanent.
They’re often not permanent, but particularly with sexual problems there is a significant minority of people who do not get better after they stop the drugs. The term to search for is “PSSD” (post-SSRI sexual dysfunction).
I've been off them for a while, but in addition to permanently worsened tinnitus, I've also been left with reduced "tingly" sensations like those experienced during ASMR and orgasms. I experienced no benefit from the half dozen that I tried. It really, really, really sucks, and if I could go back, I would have never taken them. Ironically, they were prescribed to me because my doctor was too afraid to prescribe anything else for fear of side effects.
While most of the body’s serotonin is indeed in the gut, the serotonin that impacts our mood, sleep, and other cognitive functions is exclusively produced and used in the brain.
Was going to say this. My one gripe with HN is that people say incorrect things with complete confidence pretty regularly and you can only
Detect it if you know the subject matter.
HN used to show vote count. In the past, you'd see something like your GP having a vote count of 14, and your parent (the correction) having a vote count of 53. It was super useful and helped to combat misinformation.
You're right, and I just now realized the crux of why I was so miffed by that change. It indeed helped me better understand (while skimming)... but only for those topics that I don't enough about to make my own judgements.
I undersand the reasons to do it, also, but I think you clearly elucidate what was lost... (T_T)
Vote counts indicate post popularity with the subset of users who are in the thread, they don't indicate truth.
Post that there's no verifiable empirical evidence for aliens in a thread about Navy pilots spinning tall tales and you'll get a lower post score than the people saying that Navy pilots are unimpeachable founts of truth who would never lie, much less get confused. All this reflects is the fact that people who want to believe are more likely to be drawn to a thread about aliens, and people who are skeptical of it tend to ignore those threads or actively stay away because they're afraid of what might happen to their worthless internet point score.
To be fair, this person clearly said it was a "gut" feeling, and it is also ok to be wrong about things, since being corrected on saying a wrong thing is a wonderful way to learn.
Forgive me, because I don't want to pretend I understand this. No one does. It is still a mystery. This is just a "guess" based on what I've read and experienced first hand. Also, isn't the brain/gut/nervous system all connected anyway. What makes you think only the serotonin in the brain affects mood?
And so now, how do we tell if you're the person that we should listen to? You're making your point with complete confidence (as is the parent comment)?
References people. Especially when it comes to anything related to subjects outside of tech.
I cringe nearly anytime I see anything about neuroscience on HN, and yet I keep reading. I almost wish I had studied something else just to avoid that feeling.
While the serotonin used in your gut doesn’t directly impact the brain, it does impact the enteric nervous system which communicates via the vagus nerve to your brain. So I don’t think it’s correct to say this doesn’t (or couldn’t) impact your mood (and indeed murine experiments demonstrate it does).
The evidence supporting any specific, direct behavioral function of serotonin in the brain is only marginally more substantial than the evidence supporting any specific, direct behavioral function of serotonin in the gut[1]. If anything, the evidence suggests that the behavioral effects of serotonin are more global and abstract, mediated via downstream effects on other neurotransmitters and circuits controlled chiefly by other neurotransmitters, such that behavioral correlations can only be drawn generally and indirectly.
Your confidence is totally and completely unwarranted.
We still need to understand the gut <-> brain connection and why trials like prozac or precursor supplementation helps.
It is already inconclusive that SSRIs help acute covid, but no studies have been done for long covid. That's what the researchers are calling out here.
It also seems likely that at least some of the cases of depressive symptoms and lack of fitness is due to covid isolation, which entailed a precipitous decline in both physical and social activity for a lot of people.
That was exactly my take on this study, and I wasn't happy about seeing the jump to "WE NEED MORE SSRIS, LOOK IT'S SEROTONIN" - it's already been proven that serotinin disruptions in depression are a symptom so this is the same but doctors/pharma continue to cling to the outdated "low serotonin"
The other side effect this may have is delegitimatizing the condition, much like SSRIs are thrown at chronic pain, menstrual issues and more. Since the medical institution doesn't really take these conditions seriously this is going to become another half recognized condition that doctors can say "Maybe it's Long Covid HAVE YOU TRIED SSRIS" vs working with the patient or doing research into the true causes.
The main "long covid" symptom I really detest is the loss of smell/taste - after almost 2 years I still cannot smell or taste certain things, the worst being cinnamon in things like cinnamon grahams and cinnamon buns, strangely though I can taste the cinnamon fire jolly ranchers ok.
I sound like I'm jesting, but I love food, and I'm a big fan of scent too - things just don't smell or taste right anymore.
SSRIs can cause neurogenesis, wonder if that's some of the interaction - I thought perhaps the exhaustion could be too much tryptophan turning into serotonin in the brain, which causes fatigue?
Yeah my interest in trying new foods and enjoyment in eating food itself has decreased at lot after getting covid. Had loss of taste during covid and it recovered a lot over a few months but never really came back to what it was before.
Though I guess it's not really a long covid symptom since it's not anything active, just a result of getting covid.
Much like victims of other natural disasters, there's an initial "oh shit this is huge" which eventually mellows out to "oh so this is just the new normal, and we're all just going to accept that we're going to be collectively even stupider."
Society suspended the activities of ordinary daily living as much as it could in hopes of diminishing or eliminating the risks posed by COVID. When that risk reduction encountered diminishing returns, society determined that the benefits of ordinary daily living outweighed the total risk posed by death or disablement by COVID and all other mortal threats we face daily.
Having most of the population holed up inside is bad for long-term economic growth too. Ineffectual internet-schooling replacing normal in-person schooling for more than a short time period would be particularly devastating to long-term economic growth.
There's quite a lot of data that points to a decline in many places... literacy scores are lower, math scores are lower, etc.
The effects appear to be quite bad, and haven't yet recovered in many places (especially among lower income groups). This will take some more time to distill with more accuracy, but lockdowns and remote schooling almost certainly had a negative impact.
Well, mental illnesses skyrocketed. That messes up economy bad, long term in hard-to-calculate ways since people are not simply dropping dead and disappearing from economy. No they are still around, more or less successfully trying to integrate back, but requiring a lot of support resources that would be otherwise used in other cases, ramping up the medical costs, maybe even losing jobs, failed mortgages and so on.
There you have it, one long term bad economical effect. There are many others, maybe even more significant.
I don't think a rise in mental illness is entirely attributable to lockdowns. There are several ways this pandemic can affect mental state, such as:
- COVID infection, virus messing with your brain
- Disappointment from believing COVID is man made (regardless of whether true or not)
- Death of someone close, remember that 1.1 million people have died from COVID in the United States alone
- Disappointment that the lack of care for the vulnerable exposed a survival of the fittest nonchalance where some of the most able among us couldn't be bothered to breathe through an n95 to avoid a however negligible chance of someone dying
For those now curious about taking an SSRI, please carefully research the sometimes permanent issues that can arise. It is not a class of medication to play around with.
Things like:
- Sexual dysfunction. Unable to maintain physical arousal or reach orgasm. Mental arousal may be hyper or hypo active. You take having a working dick for granted until it stops working.
- Tinnitus
- Depression/suicidal ideation. It should be noted that “suicidal ideation” less typically expresses as a direct “Yeah alright, time to kill myself now” sort of thoughts, which is often called “active ideation”. Instead it’s more often “passive ideation”, something like “I now spend hours in an whirlpool of involuntary negativity, a sort of emotional agony at existing. Daydreaming about dying/disappearing/evaporating is my only source of comfort, and hope for escape”.
- It can fuck with the very important but often ignored mechanisms that determine if your body is satisfied with what and how much you’ve eaten. Imagine the feeling of never quite having eaten enough, or always having eaten too much.
There are other things but those are the big ones I recall offhand. The side effects listed on medications are always horribly understated, because they come without human context.
We don’t actually know how SSRIs (or really, any neurochemical effecting med) work, and have no way of predicting the efficacy or side effects for a given individual yet, outside of trial and error.
Can concur. SSRIs are nasty, and waaaay overprescribed IMO. I'm so glad I got off Lexapro, but I haven't been quite the same since before I started it.
I'm surprised there is no randomized controlled trial of the effect of Vitamin D on Long Covid.
When I browse through Pubmed and read studies (a/b-tests) of Vitamin D intake and respiratory tract infections (including Covid), many large studies found a positive effect.
Good to see that there are some studies under way now.
How do you mean "preventative in nature"? Are you aware of any studies which a/b tested Vitamin D on active respiratory tract infections which showed that the Vitamin D has no effect in this situation?
Vitamin D is a very inconclusive topic. That is why it is contentious. Go search pubmed or litcovid, there’s plenty of research.
I’m just calling out the fact that your complaint is not rooted in reality.
The studies you refer to are observational tracking people who supplement vitamin D or live in places where they get it naturally more. To say vitamin D is the cure to most things or even long covid is shortsighted and frankly irresponsible. Linus Pauling did that with vitamin C and tainted public opinion on vitamins.
You shouldn’t be surprised at this at all. There is zero profit motive for the amount of money it would take to do a vitamin D trial since no one can patent vitamin D.
I always feel like the people who make these sort of comments have never actually read a medical journal.
A huge amount of study does not lead to patentable medication, but is either performed by research groups, or is performed as part of R&D of another products and then published in papers.
I have been reading medical journals for 12 years and I have collaborated on a study that is looking into manganese transport and/or deficiency as a possible cause of ME/CFS and Long Covid.
There is a difference between something that could never be patented (Vitamins), and the possibility of something working becoming patented (Prozac for example).
The first does not get the funding but from benefactors, as in the case of the study I collaborated with.
Elder friend of mine got the fatigue two weeks after covid. after everything else was ruled out she was given ssris for anxiety, and indeed she could walk again a few weeks later.
If this turns out to be as interesting as it sounds, well buy SSRI maker stocks
Not to deny your friends experience, but just to shed light on an issue common with chronic illnesses:
People naturally heal all the time from illnesses like this. They just get better with time.
People also get desperate (and sometimes their doctors) and try all manner of remedy.
You get a situation where people who naturally recover end up attributing that recovery to whatever random remedy they were trying at the time. This can be compounded by having bands of people who got sick around the same time, tried whatever flavor of the month remedy was talked about at the time, and recovered around the same time.
Having long covid myself since summer 2020, I've watched this play out more times than I can count now.
This happens all the time with sports overuse injuries also. Kinesio tape, acupuncture, chiropractor adjustments, heat, ice. People try all kinds of things, eventually you get better. Whatever you tried last seems like it helped. But who knows.
I started nicotine after reading through the (probably shoddy) studies on the topic and reading through the anecdotal reports of others experiencing relief with it. (I was desperate, have tried everything I can get my hands on + every kind of dietary intervention.) The experiences seem to be pretty mixed but at least for my form of LC it has made a substantial positive difference.
Out of everything I've tried the only other step I've taken that has made a noticeable difference for me is quitting caffeine. During my acute infection phase it was like a switch flipped that hasn't yet flipped back which completely changed how my body reacts to it. Took me forever to wean off it but doing so has also been a net positive.
I'd be very careful with SSRIs. This might very well turn out to be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
> If this turns out to be as interesting as it sounds, well buy SSRI maker stocks
Unfortunately, that suggestion on the other hand might be spot-on. Not because SSRIs truly are the cure-all they're often marketed as, but rather because manufacturers have managed to sell them as such.
Totally don’t want to pick on you but this kind of thinking makes me really wish we could fork the universe right before giving the meds and compare the results of both universes. Ugh. Stupid physics.
dont do it just because. in our case we pretty much did every kind of medical exam possible, she did display multiple anxiety symptoms that seemed like panic attacks and the fatigue was clearly related to it.
Thanks for pointing me to that comment so I could upvote it. His comment is not accurate in that there are plenty of theories, but the general idea behind the claim is far more accurate than what probably many that frequent HN believe about long COVID. Long COVID is poorly understood and the research around it has overall been inconclusive, and much of it very low-quality:
Even the linked article has a bunch of caveats like:
Joanna Hellmuth, a cognitive neurologist and clinical researcher at UC, San Francisco, who has collaborated with some of the authors but was not involved in the current study, questions the paper’s focus on the hippocampus. She notes there’s currently little evidence the typical cognitive symptoms of Long Covid are linked to memory encoding in this brain region. Although the results are interesting, in her view, “the model they’re testing doesn’t reflect the clinical condition.”
> Long COVID is poorly understood and the research around it has overall been inconclusive
This is far from the truth. Over 400 long covid publications a month for the last couple years. Science has pushed this forward to be more conclusive and defined.
Covid contrarians like Vinay are nothing but minimizers with MDs. They cherry pick what serves their narrative while ignoring the rest.
I like how you couldn't be bothered to provide a single citation or reference to back up anything you just said. If I wanted to learn how I am wrong, you certainly failed to deliver.
> Over 400 long covid publications a month for the last couple years.
Let's just assume that statement is true. I said nothing about the quantity of research on long COVID; I said it was inconclusive and largely low-quality. If anything, your factoid could support my "low quality" assertion given how little benefit has been derived from said research.
In his video on the paxlovid trials he doesn't even know what the arm sizes are. Let alone take a minute to read the trial designs:
> The placebo includes ritonavir, which does not have an effect on the virus, but will help ensure people don’t know whether they are in the Paxlovid or placebo group.
If you can't be bothered to make a good argument, then why make one at all? Also, I want to know, what kind of religious world view leads people like yourself to make evidence-less statements with an air of authority and then dig in your heel no matter how much evidence contradicts you?
Linking to "300,000" articles also doesn't count as providing a reference, by the way. Let me know what school you went to so I can make sure my kids avoid that one.
> The placebo includes ritonavir, which does not have an effect on the virus, but will help ensure people don’t know whether they are in the Paxlovid or placebo group.
I think his point was that it was a poor choice of placebo.
"Ritonavir is not active against or thought to directly contribute to the antiviral activity of the medication against SARS-CoV-2."
I'm sure you can pick up that there is a difference between "we know for sure it has no relevant impact to the study" and "we think it doesn't have any relevant impact to the study."
I highly doubt you read through the relevant bits and instead jumped to argue further:
> One particular instance is the long-term symptoms experienced by a significant percentage of COVID-19 survivors, a condition named long COVID by the patients affected (4). Some survivors of acute COVID-19 began reporting symptoms lasting much longer than the amount of time then reported for clinical recovery. Long COVID has caused skepticisms and slow responses, and to date, there is no effective treatment (5). In contrast, there is now substantial evidence that a significant percentage of COVID-19 survivors experiencing ongoing multisystemic symptoms (6–8), including respiratory issues (9), cardiovascular disease (10), cognitive impairment (11) and profound fatigue (12).
> LitCovid has so far accumulated almost 10 000 long COVID articles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/docsum?fil...) and nearly 70% of them do not mention long COVID by name in the title or abstract. We have further collected over 800 synonymous terms for long COVID and shared with the community.
This specific HN thread is a very well done publication. There are a number of prestigious institutions researching long covid and have published in nature, science, cell, jama, and more. Use the tool I just linked so you can confirm that. Perhaps you can stop with the ad hominem.
> I highly doubt you read through the relevant bits and instead jumped to argue further:
What do the relevant bits you cited have to do with you providing evidence that the research on long covid is high-quality or conclusive? I guess I should define conclusive while I'm here:
1) conclusively defines and scopes long COVID symptoms and disambiguates those symptoms from symptoms of other conditions.
2) conclusively determines the cause(s) of long COVID.
3) conclusively determines a treatment.
We already know, even from your links, that there is little to nothing for 2) or 3), and we can argue that 1) still isn't well-defined to this day.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines Long COVID as “the continuation or development of new symptoms 3 months after the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, with these symptoms lasting for at least 2 months with no other explanation.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adds that Long COVID includes a wide range of ongoing health problems that can last weeks, months, or years. The condition can affect any part of the body, and serious cases may affect multiple body systems, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, skin, and brain.
End Quote.
If the definition of symptoms includes any "new symptom" after 3 months "with no other explanation" and if it includes a "wide range of ongoing health problems", then it's pretty clear no one has conclusively scoped out what long COVID is and what it is not. "Oh, I see you're sick and we can't come up with a reason why. Let's chalk it up long COVID!"
And, of course, the best quote: "Long COVID, the condition where symptoms that surface after recovering from COVID-19 linger for weeks, months, or even years, is still a mystery to doctors and researchers.".
So there you have it. Thousands of research articles, no conclusive set of symptoms, no conclusive causes, no conclusive treatments, and still a mystery to researchers.
Early on in the AIDS epidemic, what did we know from your 1) 2) 3)?
We had no effective treatments. 3) is gone.
We didn't know about HIV yet, or the link to AIDS. 2) is gone.
AIDS makes you susceptible to a ton of infections that healthy people normally don't get, so the list of possible symptoms was large - and we couldn't disambiguate those symptoms from other conditions - they were those other conditions. Isn't that 1) gone?
Thank goodness we kept researching. And concerns about long-term health impact of AIDS were well-founded, weren't they?
I also think you're forgetting that we can measure things about populations, and correlate conditions with people who have had a known COVID diagnosis. Then, when symptoms are more common, even years later, in the people who have had COVID, if you want us to say "people who have had a known COVID diagnosis" all of the time, we could... Or maybe it's okay to just say "Long COVID."
Clinical practice is not epidemiology is not actuarial science.
I think you're (rightly?) disappointed that we don't have the Long COVID Manual for clinical practitioners. But people who study epidemics are for sure seeing a thing, and it's measurable. And it has long-term impacts on human health.
Go read my upvoted comment on this post. It gives you insights into #1 and #2. #3 doesn't exist. That's why there's over 800(400 long covid, 400 covid) clinical trials going on right now for it.
It says nothing remotely conclusive about 1), 2), or 3). It literally only says "Here's some hypotheses. We need more research."
And I think I'm done wasting my time with you. I've given you ample opportunity come up with something even a tiny fraction as definitive as the references I've given you and you've failed multiple times in a row.
Also, do you think that, in July 2020, that "most people [were] dramatically overestimating COVID-19 risk"? (As the comment I linked to stated.)
On July 12 and 13th, 2020, my uncle emailed me, "For what it’s worth, I predict the COVID-19 death toll in the next 30 months will be 2.5-3 million Americans." I emailed him "I don't know what to predict.... By 2023, I'll go with 300,000."
I'm pretty certain that my 300,000 Americans by 2023 was dramatically higher than what most people were estimating. And I was low.
And at that point, July 2020, I was just barely beginning to be concerned about long-term health impacts of those who survive COVID.
I had a globus / lump in throat sensation that was my first symptom of COVID and persisted months after. It went away somehow after I started going to the gym. Obviously can’t say if it’s connected or not, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
Similar thing here. Also had feeling of pressure in frontal lobe and strange taste. Intensity changed based on how much fitness time I could fit in schedule.
I was communicating with a co-worker the other day who put in their email signature: my energy levels are heavily impacted by long covid which results in my inability to respond quickly.
I need to come up with something because it was very clever.
For the vast majority of cases, a long COVID diagnosis is extremely short on rigor. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
I’ve seen it compared to the gulf war syndrome which happened to returning soldiers, a similar thing they spent forever looking for a cause (gas attacks etc) and never finding a physical cause. They determined it’s something that happens to people after a widespread traumatic event. Like a minor version of PTSD.
I’d love to see a study that took long COVID people and got them to do daily cardio exercise, go outside into nature, and sleep better (ie not over sleeping) and seeing if the symptoms improve vs a placebo group that sits inside all day reading doomer posts about COVID on Twitter/Facebook.
This sentiment (which is unfortunately rampant) is incredibly ignorant of the actual disease and infantilizes it's victims. I'd LOVE to see people who espouse this idea- go and do some more research about the disease they clearly don't have, and have not experienced first-hand.
Is it that we over-diagnose long COVID? Or that we under-diagnose post viral fatigue more generally?
I remember a close family member having a nasty viral infection aged 32/33 - not exactly old and frail - and they left it a very different person in terms of energy and general health. It really did take a year or so to clear up.
The evidence seems to suggest that people often get sick without a clear cause, and due to widespread fear about COVID, the sickness is often being misattributed to long COVID when that happens.
We over diagnose. It's taboo to discuss the fact that population is tumblr/twitter types, and not people that are well adjusted. It's a contagion, but it's not spread by a virus. Most people with Long COVID recover through increased exercise and improved diet. They're just depressed, which is of course a real illness, but it's more to do with burn out from social media hysteria.
Any mention of this on HN results in immediate downvote brigade.
You get down voted because there are thousands of people suffering from real physical symptoms of this - like clots and tachycardia - and you are waving away the symptoms as a mental illness.
You aren't wrong, but "the science" figured out that Epstein-Barr was connected to multiple sclerosis _last year_. Maybe some skepticism that things aren't settled is warranted - especially with something so new.
Sigh, That's not a study that's an article reviewing other cherry picked articles.
It doesn't really mean all that much tbh.
You would have to review what this review is reviewing.
Long covid is still not properly defined and is more of a blanket term of feeling like shit after virus infection
* extreme tiredness (fatigue)
* feeling short of breath
* loss of smell
* muscle aches
OR.
* problems with your memory and concentration ("brain fog")
* chest pain or tightness
* difficulty sleeping (insomnia)
* heart palpitations
* dizziness
* pins and needles
* joint pain
* depression and anxiety
* tinnitus, earaches
* feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite
* a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste
* rashes
* confusion
* trouble concentrating
* headaches
* aches and pains in the muscles
* stiff joints
* a sore throat
* swollen lymph nodes
Which was considered perfectly normal before the big C.
Maybe long covid is a thing, but it really needs proper definition then.
How sick I am of the Covid nutters. If you want research money for something it seems to be just enough to slap some covid label or other and a cheque will be written no questions asked.
Also nature is falling from grace as a top notch elite non-partisan publisher as they have definitely turned partisan in the last few years, they still had the courage to publish the devastating outcome of their political agenda though
I've got 3 friends with brain fog symptoms after 3 years of a COVID infection.
I myself take 6 months to have my brain work like before after contact with someone with COVID.
Wym "maybe long covid is a thing"? Didn't the deaths show the response to COVID is extremely varied already? I'm happy you didn't have it but I bet you know someone that does.
I agree Nature is admittedly dodgy to the left if the issue is political (climate change models, the infamous proximal Origins) but I honestly don't see long COVID being one.
Correlation doesn't equate to causation. Sub-optimal health is pervasive. Misattributing it to long COVID—as the evidence suggests is what's happening—is entirely plausible.
“With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work7, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages”
So this line needs a lot of context due to the nature of academia. It's best not to read much into it. What ends up happening is that you do some research, type it all up into a paper and then your advisor makes you add something to connect your results to the "real world." And because it's a study on virology not economics the author will just speculate on some stuff that'll later be used for marketing fodder or grant writing to say the university is working on important things. Which they are, but important work doesn't sell. Important work that laypeople recognize as important sells. And when you want government money connecting it to jobs -- ooo boy.
Obviously it's potentially very different across species but we've found what appears to be a way COVID-19 damages dogs that exhibited no ordinary symptoms of disease, in what I think was every dog infected in the study. So perhaps a human would show no symptoms after infection but still have damage from infection via a similar route.
The strains in 2020 were by far the most dangerous, both due to the inherent virulence of the strains and the much lower levels of pre-existing immunity in those who were infected compared to more recent times.
COVID seems to have become a conflict line between the left and the right, where the left wants it to be seen as more dangerous to justify the government shutdowns of businesses and restrictions on freedom of movement and association, and the right wants to expose those government controls as unjustified and disproportionate.
I've read anecdotal reports that certain serotonergic psychedelics were useful in recovery of sense of smell following COVID-related parosmia. I wonder if this is the mechanism at play in those cases.
So basically most long covid is a form of depression. It makes sense given the fact that most self reported long covid was white middle aged females over any other demographic
Once again proving that any comment on the internet starting with "So" will go absolutely off the rails haha
Even if we accept it as truth there's so many reasons why you might only be seeing that demographic. Starting with the people you surround yourself with to the possibility that anyone else needs to get by and can't show weakness without worrying about losing their income. What other demographics are you missing?
Are they all also stay at home mothers who don't need to appease a boss for instance? I don't have a better example as I don't really buy your initial claim, but things like that
So are you saying that my wife got depressed 2 weeks after having Covid? That she just all of the sudden started to be breathless with oximeter showing levels below 80% due to a depression? She was in her best moment in life, earning a 6 figures salary, reading 50 books a year, learning a 5th language and studying a 2nd master degree.
After 2 years, she is now unable to leave home and read a single book of course this makes her depressed. But long covid is very real and it starts always a few weeks after the recovery. It impacting mostly women than men has probably something to do with the immune system differences and your comment is offensive to all the people suffering this terrible disease and all the scientist investigating it.
To be fair literally every single symptom here is a symptom of depression. Has she tried SSRIs? People get depressed from disease all the time, being sick is depressing.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Lack of serotonin is correlated with depression. Mood and cognition are functions of the brain and the brain can malfunction due to pathogen. Saying this is depression isn't the same as saying it isn't a disease or that it isn't caused by covid-19.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01601-2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06651-y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z189Z7tS1w4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNMzaZk_iU
The researchers here have a specific hypothesis:
> Our animal models demonstrate that serotonin levels can be restored and memory impairment reversed by precursor supplementation or SSRI treatment. While the effectiveness of SSRIs in acute COVID-19 has been a subject of debate,69,70,71,72,73,74 no systematic exploration of SSRIs in individuals with PASC has been performed to date. Our study, together with recent findings linking depression with cognitive impairment in Long COVID75 and the effect of SSRIs on vagus nerve activity,67 call for the assessment of targeting serotonin signaling for the prevention or treatment of neurocognitive manifestations.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01034-6