NIH has a longitudinal long COVID study going.[1] 300 people who had COVID-19 and recovered get a medical exam every 6 months. Early results through 2022: [2] Nothing really exciting.
Measurement of fatigue with a 6-minute treadmill test does have a low P-value. So does a measure of mental processing speed.
The plan is to keep this study going through 2027, recruiting new patients and studying them for 3 years each.
There are solid objective results showing organ damage now. This study, in the UK, did
MRI scans of multiple organs of several hundred post-COVID patients, plus a no-COVID control group.[3] It's a longitudinal study; the same people are re-scanned at intervals. This is a serious clinical study, where everybody involved went through extensive, repeated MRI scans and blood tests for this specific study. There have been other studies that re-used scans taken for other purposes, notably from the US Veterans Administration, and those have been criticized on the ground that the people scanned already had some problem that required an expensive MRI scan. Not here. These scans were done just for this study, using the same 3 MRI scanners, with cross-checks for consistency.
From that study: "First, we confirm multi-organ impairment at 6 and 12 months in 29% of individuals with long COVID, with persistent symptoms and reduced function. Second, despite some associations between organ impairment and symptoms, there is currently insufficient evidence for distinct long COVID subtypes. Blood biomarkers, the current standard of care, showed no relation to clinical presentation. Third, symptoms, blood investigations and quantitative, multi-organ MRI did not predict trajectory or recovery. Fourth, we demonstrate feasibility of scalable, multi-organ assessment in non-acute settings in the pandemic context. Several studies confirm persistence of symptoms in individuals with long COVID up to 1 year. We now add that three in five people with long COVID have impairment in at least one organ, and one in four have impairment in two or more organs."
What's striking is that more patients show evidence of organ impairment than have self-reported complaints. Frustratingly, none of this information seems to have predictive power. They can see damage, but it doesn't help treatment. (Which means insurance probably won't cover this sort of scanning.)
So long-term organ damage from COVID is all too real.
The WHO said about 1 in 10 infections produces Long Covid earlier this year. About 25% are severely ill with it. Since the beginning of the pandemic at least 50 different studies of prevalence have been done and many show around 1 in 5 so this isn't a new finding just a particularly large study. Perhaps more concerning is the CDC and NIH studies looking at repeated infections showing that subsequent infections increase the risk, far from gaining immunity people seem to be damaged by every infection and their chance of Long Covid goes up with each infection.
Economically inactive people is growing fast in all of the western nations. Its a disease that is going to have a massive impact in the decades to come and we have no idea how many are unable to catch it. We have no treatments, no understanding of its process and there is little in the way of research funding going forward and most nations have done nothing at all.
Because some people still have a knee-jerk reaction against any insinuation of vaccination not being as effective as they have been told it is which makes them attach a 'fake news' label to articles which give the impression of questioning this premise.
strange people flagging my comment - but we were all told
1) you dont get covid if you are injected
2) you stay out of hospitals if you are injected
3) you dont have long term effects from covid if you are injected
actually the opposite is true. Friends of mine are dead, some others with multiple heart attacks, some unable to work.
But people flag my comment because they dont want to hear how they were duped - rather than getting angry about it.
the message was :
1) you're less likely to get covid if you are injected
2) you're less likely to need to go to the hospital if you are injected
3) when the vaccine first came out, no one knew of or talked about long covid
It was absolutely a thing before the vaccines. It started on social media and took a lot of pushing before doctors and researchers started looking at it.
1 in 5 covid patients reporting long covid symptoms seems really high. I would suspect that it's simply that people that have long covid symptoms are much more likely to bother participating in a covid study than those who got covid and recovered fully after 5 days.
It's also possible that some of it isn't "long COVID" at all and is just a random health symptom or problem completely unrelated to COVID. From what I've read the way they diagnose "long COVID" is somewhat suspect.
I find it hard to put much stock in studies like these, simply because as stated in the study, the symptom of long COVID observed is "most commonly fatigue (70.6%)". How can we be sure that this fatigue is not due to going through a pandemic situation? Well, they do address this later:
"This figure is substantially higher than the prevalence reported from a review of Australian data from earlier in the pandemic which found 5% to 9.7% of persons with SARS-CoV-2 experienced ‘post COVID condition’ at 12 weeks or more after infection."
So that somewhat accounts for it, although NOT completely, because later studies are more closely synchronized with more return-to-work initiatives, which means (A) more people in the office compared to earlier studies, and (B) more people on the roads. The greater contrast between earlier studies and these ones with respect to these environmental conditions could also have accounted for this higher prevalence of long COVID.
(I'm NOT saying that there is NO such thing as long COVID, only that the effect sizes MIGHT be misleading.)
Yes, and I never said it was nonexistent, a point which I explicitly mentioned at the end of my post. I merely said that the effect size might be enhanced due to return to work initiatives.
Trusting? I trust the scientific method, and part of that is criticism of the results. I pointed out a possible correlate not taking into acount in the paper.
90% of "science" these days is actually politics, pill pushing, clickbait, philantrophic PR, geopolitical soft power flexes, grant baiting or the result of industry money or lobbyism.
Not weird most people are tired of that shit.
The technological foundations are amazing, but were laid many decades ago for the most part and most "bad things" these days are the result of the highly advanced and interconnected but extremely brittle global industrial society we have built, and the inequalities that still exist for 90+ of earths population.
But those problems will not get addressed directly but instead used as excuses to implement various shock doctrines by the upper echelons to pull or push various policies to siphon even more money from the many to the few.
"Science" as known pop culturally is one of these political tools, and it's becoming apparent.
It's important to remember that science isn't a bunch of data or experts, it is a way of thinking.
That said, many don't trust the scientific system anymore. It seems like a double edged sword. We (collectively) are finding a new set point in the spectrum between "doing our own research" (eg searching inter webs or podcasts for answers), and "blindly trusting the elite experts". On complex technical things, neither one of these extremes seems optimal. The approach I strive for is to
try to always question, and to try to know what I don't know even after 'doing my own research'. it's hard and sometimes I have to defer. I think we all do. Who we defer to on a given topic is the crucial point.
The plan is to keep this study going through 2027, recruiting new patients and studying them for 3 years each.
There are solid objective results showing organ damage now. This study, in the UK, did MRI scans of multiple organs of several hundred post-COVID patients, plus a no-COVID control group.[3] It's a longitudinal study; the same people are re-scanned at intervals. This is a serious clinical study, where everybody involved went through extensive, repeated MRI scans and blood tests for this specific study. There have been other studies that re-used scans taken for other purposes, notably from the US Veterans Administration, and those have been criticized on the ground that the people scanned already had some problem that required an expensive MRI scan. Not here. These scans were done just for this study, using the same 3 MRI scanners, with cross-checks for consistency.
From that study: "First, we confirm multi-organ impairment at 6 and 12 months in 29% of individuals with long COVID, with persistent symptoms and reduced function. Second, despite some associations between organ impairment and symptoms, there is currently insufficient evidence for distinct long COVID subtypes. Blood biomarkers, the current standard of care, showed no relation to clinical presentation. Third, symptoms, blood investigations and quantitative, multi-organ MRI did not predict trajectory or recovery. Fourth, we demonstrate feasibility of scalable, multi-organ assessment in non-acute settings in the pandemic context. Several studies confirm persistence of symptoms in individuals with long COVID up to 1 year. We now add that three in five people with long COVID have impairment in at least one organ, and one in four have impairment in two or more organs."
What's striking is that more patients show evidence of organ impairment than have self-reported complaints. Frustratingly, none of this information seems to have predictive power. They can see damage, but it doesn't help treatment. (Which means insurance probably won't cover this sort of scanning.)
So long-term organ damage from COVID is all too real.
[1] https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04411147
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9128805/
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01410768231154703