7 ms·

The million dollar questions include: - Long COVID post-vaccine. >10% of people have brain damage visible on MRIs, including mild cases. - Future mutations. P

The million dollar questions include: - Long COVID post-vaccine. >10% of people have brain damage visible on MRIs, including mild cases. - Future mutations. People have been overly optimistic for 15 months now, and believed bad things couldn't happen. They do. There's no reason to believe Delta or Gamma are the end, or anywhere close.

inter_netuser 5y ago
brain damage after vaccine, or "mild" disease in vaccinated people? can you point to that MRI imaging? curious to see.
- gibba999 5y ago
  This is the major one: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v... This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. There are a lot of supporting smaller-scale studies too, replicating the same general result. E.g. https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-causes-brain-damage-even-in-mild-cases/285-eec1cf1c-ee28-4601-8af2-df71252fd340 https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-1... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066611/ If you Google, you'll find dozens of other small-scale studies.
  - eloff 5y ago
    I couldn't find where it talks about vaccinated patients in the study you linked. It's not surprising that covid19 can cause brain damage (and heart damage, and death) to unvaccinated people.
    - gibba999 5y ago
      That was listed under "The million dollar questions include" I'm now realizing formatting / phrasing was unclear. 1. >10% of mild / asymptomatic cases have brain damage. 2. The million dollar question is whether this includes vaccinated cases. Vaccines reduce hospitalizations and deaths by far more than they do mild and asymptomatic cases.
      - eloff 5y ago
        Ah, now I see what you mean. That is worrying. I hope that the rate of mild cases in vaccinated people is lower than the article would lead one to believe. I also hope the protection given is enough to avoid that kind of brain damage.
        gibba999 5y ago
        I hope so too. Extrapolating from studies I've seen, I'm not optimistic. I think it's 50/50. My impressions (and I do want to emphasize limited evidence here): - The vaccine doesn't provide sterilizing immunity -- you catch mild COVID, and then your body fights it off quickly. - It does well for stopping original COVID fast, but newer mutations get pretty far before the vaccine stops them. - The olfactory symptoms are neurological, and the phase when brain damage happens. We'll see in a few months.
        eloff 5y ago
        All I can say is I hope you're wrong on some of those points. It's inevitable that myself and my family will be exposed to covid19 at some point in the future. I think the same is true for most of us.
        gibba999 5y ago
        All I can say is that humanity, outside of Asia, has consistently had "all I can say" responses. It's a preventable slow-motion train wreck. I could be wrong, but there's no reason to believe delta and gamma are the last mutations we'll see. COVID was astronomically cheaper to exterminate pre-mutation, and astronomically cheaper before it spread. At each point, people wished things weren't that bad, only they turned out to be worse.
  - peytn 5y ago
    That first pre-print is wild. 8 pages of methods for 8 pages of results (incl. figures). Quite a "pipeline."
  - wesleywt 5y ago
    The article says nothing about vaccinated people.
  - timr 5y ago
    > This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. It shows no such thing. It's an analysis of MRIs where the authors infer loss of gray matter in specific regions of the brain. This is in no way "brain damage", and representing it this way is leaping to wild conclusions. Lest you not believe me, here is a randomized controlled trial, showing that "excessive online video gaming" reduces orbitofrontal gray matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057579/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057579/ (...so your Mom was right: gaming is turning your brain to mush!) Here is a review that shows that similar losses in gray matter are associated with anxiety and sleep loss (two problems that I'm sure didn't affect anyone in 2020): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29244642/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29244642/ Similarly: "Profound and reproducible patterns of reduced regional gray matter characterize major depressive disorder" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31341158/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31341158/ Just for fun: here's a paper that shows that "tooth loss was a causal factor for volume reduction in brain areas related to memory, learning and cognition" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29475808/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29475808/ (bonus points: can you spot the missing correlate?) The fact is, you can find research literature associating "loss of gray matter" with pretty much anything. And if a reliable trend does exist across this literature, it seems to be that gray matter changes are often seen in...wait for it: depressed people and the aged. But I'm sure that Covid has done nothing to depress people or affect the aged, so we can probably safely ignore that little detail.
    - elcomet 5y ago
      > bonus points: can you spot the missing correlate?) Concussions ?
      - timr 5y ago
        I was thinking of all of the lifestyle factors that might make one susceptible to tooth loss for >10 years prior to the study (this was a selection criteria for the participants): lack of education, nutrition, medical care, etc. The paper never controls for why these people lost their teeth. (To be fair to the researchers of this paper, they do discuss some of this, but they focus on a causal relationship between tooth loss and the other factors. They never really consider that the relationship between these factors and tooth loss could be reversed.)
  - Tepix 5y ago
    Interesting!

inter_netuser 5y ago

brain damage after vaccine, or "mild" disease in vaccinated people? can you point to that MRI imaging? curious to see.

gibba999 5y ago
This is the major one: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v... This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. There are a lot of supporting smaller-scale studies too, replicating the same general result. E.g. https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-causes-brain-damage-even-in-mild-cases/285-eec1cf1c-ee28-4601-8af2-df71252fd340 https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-1... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066611/ If you Google, you'll find dozens of other small-scale studies.
- eloff 5y ago
  I couldn't find where it talks about vaccinated patients in the study you linked. It's not surprising that covid19 can cause brain damage (and heart damage, and death) to unvaccinated people.
  - gibba999 5y ago
    That was listed under "The million dollar questions include" I'm now realizing formatting / phrasing was unclear. 1. >10% of mild / asymptomatic cases have brain damage. 2. The million dollar question is whether this includes vaccinated cases. Vaccines reduce hospitalizations and deaths by far more than they do mild and asymptomatic cases.
    - eloff 5y ago
      Ah, now I see what you mean. That is worrying. I hope that the rate of mild cases in vaccinated people is lower than the article would lead one to believe. I also hope the protection given is enough to avoid that kind of brain damage.
      - gibba999 5y ago
        I hope so too. Extrapolating from studies I've seen, I'm not optimistic. I think it's 50/50. My impressions (and I do want to emphasize limited evidence here): - The vaccine doesn't provide sterilizing immunity -- you catch mild COVID, and then your body fights it off quickly. - It does well for stopping original COVID fast, but newer mutations get pretty far before the vaccine stops them. - The olfactory symptoms are neurological, and the phase when brain damage happens. We'll see in a few months.
        eloff 5y ago
        All I can say is I hope you're wrong on some of those points. It's inevitable that myself and my family will be exposed to covid19 at some point in the future. I think the same is true for most of us.
        gibba999 5y ago
        All I can say is that humanity, outside of Asia, has consistently had "all I can say" responses. It's a preventable slow-motion train wreck. I could be wrong, but there's no reason to believe delta and gamma are the last mutations we'll see. COVID was astronomically cheaper to exterminate pre-mutation, and astronomically cheaper before it spread. At each point, people wished things weren't that bad, only they turned out to be worse.
- peytn 5y ago
  That first pre-print is wild. 8 pages of methods for 8 pages of results (incl. figures). Quite a "pipeline."
- wesleywt 5y ago
  The article says nothing about vaccinated people.
- timr 5y ago
  > This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. It shows no such thing. It's an analysis of MRIs where the authors infer loss of gray matter in specific regions of the brain. This is in no way "brain damage", and representing it this way is leaping to wild conclusions. Lest you not believe me, here is a randomized controlled trial, showing that "excessive online video gaming" reduces orbitofrontal gray matter: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057579/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057579/ (...so your Mom was right: gaming is turning your brain to mush!) Here is a review that shows that similar losses in gray matter are associated with anxiety and sleep loss (two problems that I'm sure didn't affect anyone in 2020): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29244642/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29244642/ Similarly: "Profound and reproducible patterns of reduced regional gray matter characterize major depressive disorder" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31341158/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31341158/ Just for fun: here's a paper that shows that "tooth loss was a causal factor for volume reduction in brain areas related to memory, learning and cognition" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29475808/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29475808/ (bonus points: can you spot the missing correlate?) The fact is, you can find research literature associating "loss of gray matter" with pretty much anything. And if a reliable trend does exist across this literature, it seems to be that gray matter changes are often seen in...wait for it: depressed people and the aged. But I'm sure that Covid has done nothing to depress people or affect the aged, so we can probably safely ignore that little detail.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    > bonus points: can you spot the missing correlate?) Concussions ?
    - timr 5y ago
      I was thinking of all of the lifestyle factors that might make one susceptible to tooth loss for >10 years prior to the study (this was a selection criteria for the participants): lack of education, nutrition, medical care, etc. The paper never controls for why these people lost their teeth. (To be fair to the researchers of this paper, they do discuss some of this, but they focus on a causal relationship between tooth loss and the other factors. They never really consider that the relationship between these factors and tooth loss could be reversed.)
- Tepix 5y ago
  Interesting!