5 ms·

I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing posi

I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing positive for COVID. Linking this to COVID is an example of bad science. Correlation does not equal causation. People could be experiencing these symptoms for a multitude of reasons including, but not limited to, government mandates, rules, policies, inflation, economic difficulties, isolation, remote work, etc. Even their comment about the impact of vaccines can be explained in this context: > The vaccines are certainly helping. Before they became available, about one-third of everyone infected with the virus came down with long COVID, Koralnik says. “There is brand-new data showing that if you’ve been double vaccinated and boosted, then the risk of developing long COVID, if you get COVID, is probably more like 16, 17 percent If your state of mind and anxiety about things are included as “long COVID” symptoms, it makes sense that the peace of mind offered to people who get vaccinated would put them in a better head space to not experience these symptoms regardless of how effective the vaccines are. None of this means that it is impossible to have lingering COVID symptoms. Of course that can happen, but that can happen with any disease.

bbstats 4y ago
>If your state of mind and anxiety about things are included as “long COVID” symptoms, it makes sense that the peace of mind offered to people who get vaccinated would put them in a better head space to not experience these symptoms regardless of how effective the vaccines are. Correlation does not equal causation.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  No, but when a certain set of symptoms are expected in a certain situation, it does not make sense to invent a new hypothetical disease without having any proof of it except for those very symptoms.
  - bbstats 4y ago
    Long COVID is not a "new hypothetical disease" but a collection of various post COVID symptoms that have strong correlations (hi!) with pre-existing non-psychological conditions. The fact that these disparate health issues are grouped into this neat-sounding category is unfortunate I agree, but also is a consequence of you know, millions and millions of people with issues all at once.
nequo 4y ago
> People could be experiencing these symptoms for a multitude of reasons including, but not limited to, government mandates, rules, policies, inflation, economic difficulties, isolation, remote work, etc. But if people who have tested positive experience these symptoms at a higher rate than people who haven’t, while both populations are exposed to mandates, inflation, etc., then it is reasonable to question whether mandates, inflation, etc. are the cause or the long-term effects of COVID.
- fsociety999 4y ago
  I agree, but that is not what the study in the linked article shows. It looks like they only looked at people who had previously tested positive for COVID: > They ran an analysis of the first 509 COVID patients treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and, in a paper published later that year, reported that 42 percent of them experienced neurological symptoms upon contracting COVID, 63 percent upon being hospitalized, and 82 percent over the entire course of the disease. From what I have seen, this is the same with the other long COVID studies I have seen as well as the other references in this article. Do you have an example of a study that compares long COVID symptoms of people who tested positive compared to people who never had COVID? I would be very interested in reading that.
- ibz 4y ago
  People who tested positive have definitely had more psychological stress, simply due to knowing they tested positive, which added up to the before mentioned stress factors. Also, people who took tests in the first place are people who were more likely to feel stressed due to the existence of this disease than people who never did any test at all.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  It is possible that people who got covid have increased anxiety about long covid which leads to additional issues.
timcavel 4y ago
rektide 4y ago
This post completely blows off & tells people who keep feeling something that they are wrong & unjustified, that since we're not fully sure we can believe them & it's not worth regarding their cases as real. I not humbly disagree. I dont see how we could ever even begin to be a society if we allow mistrust & rejection of possibilities to be the primary shaper of our opinions & positions. The refusal to regard here is actively harmful. > I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing positive for COVID. Linking this to COVID is an example of bad science. Yo, what? Excuse you? You're going to disregard people's reports & assessments, call it bad science, just throw up correlation does not equal causation qed & pretend like the job is done? People feel like shit, have incredibly fuzzy brain states for a while after covid. Even those who physically (aerobically) recover still doubt how healed their are, are anxious because the brain still feels behind. Maybe some of this anxiety you disregard is because they are never sure if they ever will really truly ever recover; this has felt like shit to me and Im never sure Im back to who I was before this ordeal. That seems widely reported, real to me & I'd expect some familiarity with thay from others. That feeling of brain fog is real, that worrying & anxiety is real although perhaps not directly entirely attributable, but a serious & clear & inarguable & concerning secondary effect that we frankly dont have a ton of good data to help people fully through. Even if we did have the data, people are still allowed to be afraid. Afraid of flying, afraid of escallators, afraid their bloody mind is scrambled & not really recovering like it should be. Sorry comrade but science aint always so simple & clear & direct. Finding out can be hard. Just because the facts dont conveniently line up to make sometbing clear right away doesnt give you license to disresged, to ignore possibly real information. There's a word for argumentation that tries to make information in general less believed, less real: disinformation. Please dont border so close to being actively denialist of possoble validity.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Look, it might be annoying, but if it weren't for that kind of attitude they'd have already discovered all the science and written all of the software a few thousand years ago in Babylon and we'd be out of work.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
Couldn't we just prove this by brain-scanning long covid people and brain-scanning people who don't have long covid but lived through the pandemic anyways? My understanding is that long covid actually has measurable brain scan abnormalities that anxiety, depression, or whatever can't explain...
- groby_b 4y ago
  Alas, no. Research is starting to find biomarkers for long Covid. (IIRC, it's mostly antigen presence right now). That's part of the problem. We don't have clear biomarkers, we don't have a clear definition what it is, we don't have agreement what symptoms exactly are included, and we aren't even fully aligned on what "long" means. (>4 weeks? >6 weeks? >3 months?)
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Post-exertional malaise (PEM) is probably the most agreed upon core symptom of LongCovid and is easy to test. Do a max exertion exercise two days apart, if the second one is nowhere near the first one then it’s likely you have PEM and LongCovid.
    - nradov 4y ago
      A two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test can be useful to diagnose ME/CFS regardless of whether it was caused by a SARS-CoV-2 infection or something else. But it's not definitive by itself. Maximum exercise capacity varies significantly day-to-day for the same individual based on nutrition, sleep, alcohol consumption, menstrual cycle, mental state, and other factors. In most test protocols they stop when the patient gives up, but some days people are just more willing to suffer and push through the pain to get a little farther. We can get some additional clues by looking at certain objective measures like HRV but even that isn't definitive. Long COVID is really more of a syndrome, a rough grouping of symptoms rather that a specific condition. It's so vague and covers such a wide range of different symptoms as to be clinically useless.
      - 4y ago
ck2 4y ago
Ha listen to you denying something tens of millions of people are suffering with is even real. It's taking out athletes, professional athletes, left and right. There are multiple studies showing severe mitochondria dysfunction for months, years afterwards. It's even identical to the years after the original SARS in 2003. But yeah, must not be real because you read some papers. I guess one person at a time has to experience it for themselves but then it's too late because there's no actual cure like ME-CFS, your life quality just sucks for whatever time you have left.
- kortilla 4y ago
  They didn’t deny long covid is real. They explained that this particular study is shit science because it didn’t control for these very basic confounding factors.
maj0rhn 4y ago
Correlation may not equal causation, but correlation does define syndromes. In medicine, a "syndrome" is any collection of findings that tend to occur together. A syndromic label says nothing about how or why the findings occur together, only that they do. As syndromes become better understood, they can morph into a disease. For example, swollen lymph nodes in gay men was a syndrome in 1981, but as knowledge evolved, we came to know it as AIDS and then HIV. So "long covid" is definitely a syndrome. Hopefully medical science will someday learn enough to know whether it is a disease or not.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BlueScreenDeath 4y ago
thayne 4y ago
It's also quite possible that the covid infection itself didn't cause those symptoms, but the experience of getting sick, having to quarantine, telling people you have a disease everyone is afraid of, etc. causes mental stress that leads to persistent depression and anxiety.
jasfi 4y ago
Some of this could be related to the corticosteroids (glucocorticoids) sometimes given to treat long COVID: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/oral-inhaled-steroids-brain-changes-wellness/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/oral-inhaled-stero... https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e062446 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e062446 This is also given to sufferers of asthma and hayfever.
nicolas_t 4y ago
Very anecdotal but the people I know who got long COVID were all doing perfectly fine until after they got COVID. So, at least the 2+ years before they got omicron didn't cause them to be depressed. They also are not affected by the economic situation and have stable jobs. None of them have any material differences in circumstances compared to before they had COVID and all of them had COVID late in the omicron wave after being fully vaccinated. Of course, that's purely anecdotal but it does hint that there must be something else happening.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Elephant in room.

bbstats 4y ago

>If your state of mind and anxiety about things are included as “long COVID” symptoms, it makes sense that the peace of mind offered to people who get vaccinated would put them in a better head space to not experience these symptoms regardless of how effective the vaccines are. Correlation does not equal causation.

bheadmaster 4y ago
No, but when a certain set of symptoms are expected in a certain situation, it does not make sense to invent a new hypothetical disease without having any proof of it except for those very symptoms.
- bbstats 4y ago
  Long COVID is not a "new hypothetical disease" but a collection of various post COVID symptoms that have strong correlations (hi!) with pre-existing non-psychological conditions. The fact that these disparate health issues are grouped into this neat-sounding category is unfortunate I agree, but also is a consequence of you know, millions and millions of people with issues all at once.

nequo 4y ago

> People could be experiencing these symptoms for a multitude of reasons including, but not limited to, government mandates, rules, policies, inflation, economic difficulties, isolation, remote work, etc. But if people who have tested positive experience these symptoms at a higher rate than people who haven’t, while both populations are exposed to mandates, inflation, etc., then it is reasonable to question whether mandates, inflation, etc. are the cause or the long-term effects of COVID.

fsociety999 4y ago
I agree, but that is not what the study in the linked article shows. It looks like they only looked at people who had previously tested positive for COVID: > They ran an analysis of the first 509 COVID patients treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and, in a paper published later that year, reported that 42 percent of them experienced neurological symptoms upon contracting COVID, 63 percent upon being hospitalized, and 82 percent over the entire course of the disease. From what I have seen, this is the same with the other long COVID studies I have seen as well as the other references in this article. Do you have an example of a study that compares long COVID symptoms of people who tested positive compared to people who never had COVID? I would be very interested in reading that.
ibz 4y ago
People who tested positive have definitely had more psychological stress, simply due to knowing they tested positive, which added up to the before mentioned stress factors. Also, people who took tests in the first place are people who were more likely to feel stressed due to the existence of this disease than people who never did any test at all.
_-david-_ 4y ago
It is possible that people who got covid have increased anxiety about long covid which leads to additional issues.

timcavel 4y ago

rektide 4y ago

This post completely blows off & tells people who keep feeling something that they are wrong & unjustified, that since we're not fully sure we can believe them & it's not worth regarding their cases as real. I not humbly disagree. I dont see how we could ever even begin to be a society if we allow mistrust & rejection of possibilities to be the primary shaper of our opinions & positions. The refusal to regard here is actively harmful. > I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing positive for COVID. Linking this to COVID is an example of bad science. Yo, what? Excuse you? You're going to disregard people's reports & assessments, call it bad science, just throw up correlation does not equal causation qed & pretend like the job is done? People feel like shit, have incredibly fuzzy brain states for a while after covid. Even those who physically (aerobically) recover still doubt how healed their are, are anxious because the brain still feels behind. Maybe some of this anxiety you disregard is because they are never sure if they ever will really truly ever recover; this has felt like shit to me and Im never sure Im back to who I was before this ordeal. That seems widely reported, real to me & I'd expect some familiarity with thay from others. That feeling of brain fog is real, that worrying & anxiety is real although perhaps not directly entirely attributable, but a serious & clear & inarguable & concerning secondary effect that we frankly dont have a ton of good data to help people fully through. Even if we did have the data, people are still allowed to be afraid. Afraid of flying, afraid of escallators, afraid their bloody mind is scrambled & not really recovering like it should be. Sorry comrade but science aint always so simple & clear & direct. Finding out can be hard. Just because the facts dont conveniently line up to make sometbing clear right away doesnt give you license to disresged, to ignore possibly real information. There's a word for argumentation that tries to make information in general less believed, less real: disinformation. Please dont border so close to being actively denialist of possoble validity.

whatshisface 4y ago
Look, it might be annoying, but if it weren't for that kind of attitude they'd have already discovered all the science and written all of the software a few thousand years ago in Babylon and we'd be out of work.
bheadmaster 4y ago

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

Couldn't we just prove this by brain-scanning long covid people and brain-scanning people who don't have long covid but lived through the pandemic anyways? My understanding is that long covid actually has measurable brain scan abnormalities that anxiety, depression, or whatever can't explain...

groby_b 4y ago
Alas, no. Research is starting to find biomarkers for long Covid. (IIRC, it's mostly antigen presence right now). That's part of the problem. We don't have clear biomarkers, we don't have a clear definition what it is, we don't have agreement what symptoms exactly are included, and we aren't even fully aligned on what "long" means. (>4 weeks? >6 weeks? >3 months?)
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Post-exertional malaise (PEM) is probably the most agreed upon core symptom of LongCovid and is easy to test. Do a max exertion exercise two days apart, if the second one is nowhere near the first one then it’s likely you have PEM and LongCovid.
  - nradov 4y ago
    A two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test can be useful to diagnose ME/CFS regardless of whether it was caused by a SARS-CoV-2 infection or something else. But it's not definitive by itself. Maximum exercise capacity varies significantly day-to-day for the same individual based on nutrition, sleep, alcohol consumption, menstrual cycle, mental state, and other factors. In most test protocols they stop when the patient gives up, but some days people are just more willing to suffer and push through the pain to get a little farther. We can get some additional clues by looking at certain objective measures like HRV but even that isn't definitive. Long COVID is really more of a syndrome, a rough grouping of symptoms rather that a specific condition. It's so vague and covers such a wide range of different symptoms as to be clinically useless.
    - 4y ago

ck2 4y ago

Ha listen to you denying something tens of millions of people are suffering with is even real. It's taking out athletes, professional athletes, left and right. There are multiple studies showing severe mitochondria dysfunction for months, years afterwards. It's even identical to the years after the original SARS in 2003. But yeah, must not be real because you read some papers. I guess one person at a time has to experience it for themselves but then it's too late because there's no actual cure like ME-CFS, your life quality just sucks for whatever time you have left.

kortilla 4y ago
They didn’t deny long covid is real. They explained that this particular study is shit science because it didn’t control for these very basic confounding factors.

maj0rhn 4y ago

Correlation may not equal causation, but correlation does define syndromes. In medicine, a "syndrome" is any collection of findings that tend to occur together. A syndromic label says nothing about how or why the findings occur together, only that they do. As syndromes become better understood, they can morph into a disease. For example, swollen lymph nodes in gay men was a syndrome in 1981, but as knowledge evolved, we came to know it as AIDS and then HIV. So "long covid" is definitely a syndrome. Hopefully medical science will someday learn enough to know whether it is a disease or not.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BlueScreenDeath 4y ago

thayne 4y ago

It's also quite possible that the covid infection itself didn't cause those symptoms, but the experience of getting sick, having to quarantine, telling people you have a disease everyone is afraid of, etc. causes mental stress that leads to persistent depression and anxiety.

jasfi 4y ago

Some of this could be related to the corticosteroids (glucocorticoids) sometimes given to treat long COVID: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/oral-inhaled-steroids-brain-changes-wellness/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/oral-inhaled-stero... https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e062446 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e062446 This is also given to sufferers of asthma and hayfever.

nicolas_t 4y ago

Very anecdotal but the people I know who got long COVID were all doing perfectly fine until after they got COVID. So, at least the 2+ years before they got omicron didn't cause them to be depressed. They also are not affected by the economic situation and have stable jobs. None of them have any material differences in circumstances compared to before they had COVID and all of them had COVID late in the omicron wave after being fully vaccinated. Of course, that's purely anecdotal but it does hint that there must be something else happening.

t0bia_s 4y ago
Elephant in room.