This study sucks. They also use people who they “suspect” of covid as long as they report 1 out of possible 53 symptoms, which can be comorbid with any number of a myriad of other diseases. These are also self reported by patients via questionnaire. It was also only done in France.
This study is crap, sorry.
Good catch, so if we filter just for confirmed cases it would skew more towards the rapid group, but I’m unsure how much.
The odds ratio of confirmed case was 2.59x for rapidly decreasing and 0.96x for high persistent.
I would consider long COVID mostly resolving in two years to be moderately good news.
Not really Covid related, but I was just contacted to join the Moderna Phase II study for an MRNA flu vaccine and I signed up. Maybe it’ll be less shitty than our current generation of flu vaccines.
Their previous round of trials for their flu shot showed titer levels basically slightly ahead of the regular flu shot for influenza A, but it underwhelmed against influenza B (still had some protection, though).
In interim results from the late-stage study posted Thursday afternoon, Moderna found that mRNA-1010 was superior to an approved vaccine in creating antibodies against the A/H3N2 and A/H1N1 strains. The shot also was superior in antibody levels against the A/H3N2 strain and equal to the approved shot for A/H1N1.
But Moderna’s vaccine did not match the approved shot on the influenza B/Victoria- and B/Yamagata-lineage strains. Back in 2021, Moderna said that the candidate boosted protection against all strains.
So here’s an interesting study (really a data review) published in The Lancet, which defines long-COVID as lasting past 28 days and post-COVID as past 84 days. They only accepted individuals who had been COVID/long-COVID/post-COVID symptom free for at least 30 days prior to infection.
15% of long-COVID sufferers developed post-COVID, so if you assume (this may be a bit of a leap) that you must have long-COVID to suffer from post-COVID, and you assume the long-COVID rate is around 13% (seems to be about where we’re falling) then post-COVID is down to 1.95%. That’s pretty good.
Anything that resolves in under three months without any long-term damage wouldn’t scare me out of a normal lifestyle, and I think it’s wise to split it out in future research if there’s a delineator like that. I often get a post-viral cough lasting 4-6 weeks after any random upper respiratory tract cold, but that’s not a big deal.
They didn’t do any analysis of Omicron, and it does appear long/post covid symptoms have varied quite a bit by variant which seems odd to me - like covid-19 variants are so radically different in which parts of the body they can affect.
They also found no evidence that vaccination reduces the severity/duration of long/post COVID once you have it. Prior studies have found that it reduces not only the risk of infection but also the risk of long-COVID.
So this is a phase II trial where. The woman on the phone indicated they were testing different dosing levels. Maybe with a higher dose? I’ll report my results!
Can someone who understands big confusing medical words and scientific words explain wtf this is saying? It seems to be saying their are prion disease-like elements to long COVID? Not that COVID actually causes prion disease? Right?
pretty sure some strains of influenza can too
It looks like part of the spike protein works in a similar way, not that it causes prion disease, but it does seem to say COVID could possibly worsen pre-existing neurodegenerative diseases, which is worrying.
Haven’t read this but will say COVID is an absolute gold rush situation as far as getting grants/funding/ publications.
So you gotta expect essentially every biomedical researcher in the country is attempting “whatever I usually research” + COVID as way to gather funding/publications etc. That is good as going to generate a lot of knowledge but also going to be phenomenal amount of noise. Personally unless this is truly fun I wouldn’t even bother with stuff like this article which isn’t even an actual study from quick glance
It’s the opposite of fun, but I’m trying to stay as informed as possible.
Yeah at this point I’m fairly confident COVID is doing significant damage neurologically. The big question to me is whether it’s worsening existing stuff, expediting onset, or causing it all together. They’re all awful, but to varying degrees.
I’ll be very surprised if this ends up being all statistical noise. But, maybe. Hopefully, it is. Seems very unlikely, though.
Deaths have decoupled to an extent, but we’re also undercounting them.
Also you’re much better off going to review articles or going to Science/Nature and getting overviews of the latest news. I never read much into what any one study says, this stuff can get noisy and sometimes you need to be a legit expert to make sense of it all.
Yeah and like you said it’s good for the review to be more of a major journal where the editors have found it interesting and sought out the experts to write the review. The smaller ones are often sales pitches for the authors research career. Like this one ends with something that I’m sure conveniently aligns with his research experience.
“They are however sure to open new and intriguing chapters in the study of viral neurology, the epidemiology and neurobiology of these highly transmissible zoonotic entities, and multiple, highly interactive aspects of the human neurological and systemic pathophysiology associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and neurodegeneration, especially in cases involving the elderly and in immunologically compromised human populations.”
Thought these were worth sharing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/05/25/long-covid-symptoms-recover-study/
Another one of those studies that was sorta like the last one you posted:
i’m sorta skeptical when their methodology is just collecting patient reported symptoms. there’s tests for cognitive function. why aren’t there any studies running cognitive tests? I didn’t read the entire thing other than the methodology but al these studies have been like:
among this absolute clusterfuck of symptoms across the board covid patients are showing this, based on the symptoms they are describing, therefore: brain fog.
cognitive testing needs to be done on these same groups and compared to the controll group, in my opinion, or I just kind of dismiss these as fancy statistical noise. when they start using words like “weights” I get skeptical too.
dont get me wrong. I think long covid is a thing and that I was dealing with it last year. I just think people really try to publish on stuff like this to get out there and you always have to watch for statistical tricks or dumb methodologies because pop science will run with anything that makes a good headline.
Dude you really gotta read these things before you get worried. Like the first one did testing on people while they were acutely sick (within 6hrs of diagnosis) and compared them to non-sick people. When olds get sick with anything they tend to get delirious…. So guess what they found???
This is like the most standard finding imaginable, olds get confused when they get sick, tired, hungry or take too many meds. Young people generally don’t as much
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Patients infected with Omicron variant showed comparable total scores of MMSE and MoCA to control subjects . Importantly, the COVID-19 patients over 50 years (61.9 ± 7.4 years, n = 100), but not those younger than 50 years (34.2 ± 9.5 years, n = 115), showed significantly lower total scores of MoCA and MMSE than controls (62.0 ± 7.3 years, n = 100; 34.3 ± 8.8 years, n = 115) (both P < 0.05, Fig. 1b). In addition, the female patients over 50 years (n = 60 in both groups) had significantly lower total scores of MMSE and MoCA than controls (both P < 0.05, Fig. 1c), while male patients aged over 50 (n = 40 in both groups) did not show significantly lower total scores of MMSE and MoCA compared with controls (Fig. 1c). Specifically, patients over 50 years infected with the Omicron variant demonstrated lower scores of attention and calculation in MMSE, and lower scores of forward/backward digit span, serial 7 s-administration, verbal fluency, and abstraction in MoCA (all P < 0.05, Fig. 1d–i).
I dunno, I had omicron and I don’t feel any dumber than I wuz b4.