4 ms·

Long-COVID sounds like pseudo-science to me. They poll a bunch of people who have had COVID, and then attribute the reported symptoms to COVID, when there are a

Long-COVID sounds like pseudo-science to me. They poll a bunch of people who have had COVID, and then attribute the reported symptoms to COVID, when there are a host of confounding factors. For example, anxiety - the most commonly reported long-COVID symptom - can easily be explained by the extreme fear surrounding COVID, or the two weeks of total isolation that all people diagnosed with COVID are prescribed. The negative impact of fear is being completely dismissed by a large cross-section of the population. Reposting what I posted above: https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?s=20 https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?... >>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"

tehjoker 5y ago
Some of the symptoms could be seen as psychological, but I've read several studies that identified brain damage in imaging, lung damage, heart damage, and kidney damage. It's real. I'm writing an article on this, but the research has required so much reading and interpretation it's taking me a long time. Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous. One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away. Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557 "To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  This is a very small, non-controlled, non-randomized study. Earlier studies of this nature, on young adults, were later debunked by larger studies: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-athletes-had-inflammatory-heart-disease-after-covid https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-... We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.

tehjoker 5y ago

Some of the symptoms could be seen as psychological, but I've read several studies that identified brain damage in imaging, lung damage, heart damage, and kidney damage. It's real. I'm writing an article on this, but the research has required so much reading and interpretation it's taking me a long time. Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous. One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away. Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557 "To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "

CryptoPunk 5y ago
This is a very small, non-controlled, non-randomized study. Earlier studies of this nature, on young adults, were later debunked by larger studies: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-athletes-had-inflammatory-heart-disease-after-covid https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-... We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.