The exact nature of long COVID is still coming to light, but we just got some of the best evidence yet that this debilitating condition stems from a brain injury.
As someone with long COVID, I can vouch the debilitating mental effects. I was teaching math to 4th through 8th grade students when I got it. I can remember standing in a classroom talking about a lesson and just having my mind go blank in mid sentence. I couldn't function. Not knowing what I was talking about or even where I was. Thankfully the students where very understanding and someone would finish my point I was making. I still suffer from it yet today, nearly 2 years later.
I have respiratory issues despite every CT scan showing nothing more than a couple of small pneumonia scars form long ago. I should be able to breathe just fine with no reduction of lung capacity. It stems from a lack coordination with my diaphragm - It runs backwards when I exert myself causing shortness of breath. Another sign of probable brain injury. And despite using a therapy tool to try and fix the issue, at best it just helps a little.
The upshot is I have pretty much stopped doing a lot of things I used to do because of the difficulties breathing and I spend a lot more time away from people due to an unreasonable fear of COVID.
It has caused me to retire earlier than I wanted to. And my life has greatly changed - and not for the better either.
Sorry you're going through all of that. There obviously aren't any long term studies on it yet, but hopefully things will improve more and more over time.
According to my Pulmonolgist - Nope. Her observations of all her patients over the years is that if you don't get over it in about a year, you don't get better. And she has been seeing more COVID patients than her "normal" patients for several years now. Long term care is going to be a real problem for society going forward.
But fortunately a lot of them don't care about such things as the quantity of blood on their hands, so news like this won't worsen their lives or self-image.
Seriously. I spent 2 days in the hospital last week with bilateral pulmonary embolisms after having COVID the middle of last month. I was NOT otherwise at risk for clots. A terrible surprise that I'll no doubt be recovering from for some time. I'm on a blood thinner for 6 months.
Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.
Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @[email protected] is specialised in it.
Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).
As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.
CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.
It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.
That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.
It's another one like long covid where so much of the medical community thinks it's all in people's heads and not real, but unlike long covid it's less prevalent and thus studied less. We still don't know what it is.
There's even some hopes that figuring out long covid might lead to new ways to look into what cfs really is.
I'm still afraid of long-c. I insisted that we wore masks in airports and on flights when we took a trip last month. We live life in a normal fashion everywhere else (because we're vaxxed and boosted), but I wasn't willing to risk that environment.
If they're US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they've ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it's likely the only one available to them.
Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
It's very subjective. You can read more about it by searching around, but the prevailing definition means people who had more severe reactions to the infection than the average patient, which almost unanimously means a severe and prolonged inflammatory response.
What they are finding more and more is that this specific virus triggers undiagnosed or dormant autoimmune responses in patients. If you're familiar with Rheumatism at all, imagine a massive reaction to, say, twisting your ankle, but it goes out of control and causes swelling all over your body including your brain, lungs, heart, and renal system. This is actually what killed the most patients pre-vaccination.
The full body assault of an inflammatory response just makes the body unable to cope, and things start shutting down. It can kill children and older people very easily if you can't get it under control. Many succumbed to Pneumonia, but those that lived had damage to their major internal organs from the inflammatory response. You can also see some had been using the term "Walking COVID", meaning people who had cleared the infection, but had long term sustained symptoms similar to Emphysema. They've since just moved on to calling everything "Long COVID". Some people recover, some people don't.
This study finally identified the specific damage and detection to brain activity.
People don't get it. The inflammatory process can do these sort of thing to any organ or system, or parts of them.
People got a thing called COVID Toe. This is where you and every person already has some fungus that live on their feet and which gets into the skin and toenails. Maybe you have a little yellowing of the toenails or you're just "prone to athletes foot."
Then you get COVID and suddenly your immune system is working overtime. The fungus starts to multiply faster and spreads more aggressively. Your toes start to get itchy and red, more than usual. They swell. They yellow. Then they start to crack and ooze, possibly requiring surgical debridement or in the most severe cases, such as where the patient already had diabetes affecting their peripheral nerves, amputation of the foot to prevent necrosis and sepsis. Imagine dying from athletes foot because your immune system was overwhelmed fighting a coronavirus.
Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19.
Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
[..]
In living brains of those with long COVID, however, conventional MRI studies have shown no structural abnormalities in the brainstem.
Do these people not proof-read their own articles?
Normal hospital-type MRI scanners can't see inside the brain with the kind of chemical and physical detail we need. But with 7T (7 Tesla) scanners, we can now measure these details
Not the best article, but I think what they are trying to say over multiple paragraphs is that new higher resolution MRI machines can see the damage that normal lower resolution MRI can't see
yes, I can guess that explanation when trying to figure out the seeming contradiction. I don't read scientific articles to end up guessing because the author can't string together a well structured text. :)
I have to choose what to spend my time on. If an article contradicts itself that obviously after I spent 2-5 minutes reading, I'll go look for more intelligent texts.