8 ms·

New study will examine irritable bowel syndrome as long Covid symptom

33 points by elorant 3y ago

PaulKeeble 3y ago
I have already seen several studies with the same scope and I know microbiome companies like Biomesight have already been collecting mass data on it. What is needed is research into treatments.
starbugs 3y ago
Honest question: How much is really known about long Covid and have there been studies investigating whether similar symptoms could be caused by the vaccines as well? (This is not a political statement. I am honestly interested in what the state of empirical evidence on the issue is and I found it hard to find out anything definite about it as a layman.)
- ljf 3y ago
  There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I have not heard of people saying they contracted long covid is response to the vaccine (without getting covid) - though I will admit I've tried to stay away from long covid news these days.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    > There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I didn't say either/or.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - starbugs 3y ago
    > You know a lot of people got Covid before the vaccines even existed... > So really you are asking if all the researchers are idiots No. I did not say either/or. I also don't think this is a productive way of having a conversation.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    This is a really aggressive and bad faith response. do better please
    - watwut 3y ago
      It is actually accurate reframing of the question. And yep, that question was likely to be politically motivated too.
      - starbugs 3y ago
        If you don't allow other people to ask questions, then I think it's more likely that you are yourself politically motivated. This question might be asked by someone who has someone near them suffering said symptoms after having been vaccinated or after having suffered from long Covid (or both). It's entirely unpolitical. Honestly, it's worrying that we still aren't able to speak about these things openly without this kind of comment even in a community like this.
    - badcppdev 3y ago
      Fine. But I was very sad that the questioner didn't do some googling before they introduced a spurious question about vaccines into a comment thread about long covid. 20% of the US population remain unvaccinated. I think that 60 million people is a sufficient control sample to be able to tell the difference between long covid issues and vaccine issues.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I've seen people claim that the vaccines ultimately cured their long covid. My suspicion is that a significant portion of long covid cases (and I'd be willing to bet a majority) are better described as anxiety disorders. I say that as someone with a large amount of personal knowledge on the subject of anxiety gained over a lifetime. Including lots of bowel issues.
  - wayfinder 3y ago
    Well I could reasonably bike up one specific very steep hill near my place without downshifting much until I got covid. Then it took me more then half a year to get back to that point. It was a very slow recovery but most importantly, it could be quantitatively measured first from how far until I had to disembark my bike to walk up the rest of the hill to eventually the lowest gear I had to to shift into to get to the top without ever disembarking. I’ve never had any other flu-like sickness cause me to be weak for so long.
    - beagle3 3y ago
      I didn’t either, but a friend did take almost a year to completely recover what was (likely) the flu. One should remember that the flu has been around forever, so the flus you are comparing to were probably the 10th exposure - recovering from a new illness - and not being a small child - may take much longer.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    If I remember right, something like 60% of people who claim to have long covid have never tested positive for covid. It could be they never got a test, or it was just too long to still be positive, but whatever the exact number was it was a really high percentage so I'm also leaning towards a large amount of it being psychosomatic or having some other cause.
  - perbu 3y ago
    This is very typical. If you know a lot of about anxiety, you'll have an anxiety bias and will try to explain everything as anxiety. Psychologists will also perceive LC to be psychological. Immunologists tend to think it is immune related, gastrologs think it is gut-related, etc. Out of all these it's quite simple to dismiss the psychological explanations of LC. There are obvious physical changes found in various tissue and blood in LC patients. Changes that we can be reasonably certain aren't caused by mental issues.
- Tobani 3y ago
  How much do we know? Probably not as much as we might think we know. Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis. Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel
  - psychlops 3y ago
    > Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid.
    - stetrain 3y ago
      Hm? If Group A and Group B have similar outcomes, then the outcome would seem to not be correlated to the difference between Group A and B. Whether or not the vaccine is a cause of long covid symptoms is not the same as whether the vaccine prevents long covid symptoms.
      - goda90 3y ago
        The real question would be can long covid symptoms develop from the vaccine alone, without covid infection.
        stetrain 3y ago
        And that's tough to study in the general population since a lot of vaccine recipients have had covid infections, whether or not they even realized it or tested positive.
        climatekid 3y ago
        This. It’s also very possible people can get long COVID from COVID, but it’s exacerbated and/or more likely for those who are vaccinated
- linuxftw 3y ago
  We don't know what systemic effects the vaccines have because the companies lied and said the vaccines stay at the injection site (aka, therefor they don't need to do more expensive testing). We also now know that the manufacturing process for some brands was different from the trial groups to general availability, the latter of which contained much more varied biological material. So, what could a bunch of unpure mRNA, RNA, and DNA strands coated in an immune system-evading 'nano-coating' do to your body? God only knows at this point, we didn't do the science to find out.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    To downvoters: Point 1 was in a Pfizer document first leaked from Japan's government in mid 2021, officially released a year or more later. Point 2 (ish) was in a footnote in Pfizer's FDA approval notice, there were formulation changes in the inactive ingredients between the EUA and brand version for (IIRC) shelf-life stability. I don't remember details on the exact difference being in there though, and I don't remember differences between the trial and EUA versions (but scaling up can cause this by accident).
    - linuxftw 3y ago
      Thanks, I'm not talking about the difference in the EUA and the Approved versions. I'm talking about the clinical trial vs all subsequent versions with regards to how the actual vaccine genetic material was produced. I can't find the reference at the moment, but I believe they used PCR to replicate the mRNA during the trials, and used the bacteria replication for the subsequent versions. Here's a professor giving testimony to his findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY
- psychlops 3y ago
  The symptoms remain untestable and therefore can be mixed with a host of other issues and diseases that are untestable. They will not be able to differentiate between a person with long covid, a person with long covid plus another untestable similar disease, or a person with an untestable similar disease for a long time, if ever.
willcipriano 3y ago
IBS is a illness that many people legitimately suffer, but also many hypochondriacs claim to have without evidence. The symptom profile of long covid is very close to lyme disease, another disease people actually get but also many more people claim to have without evidence. I'd like to see the overlap between long covid sufferers, IBS, lyme disease, people with a gluten allergy, PCOS etc and the level of evidence that they actually have those diseases.
- Bjartr 3y ago
  > also many more people claim to have without evidence I've long been curious what the ratio is in various situations like this. It seems the lynchpin for any argument for withholding support. I've only ever seen the equivalent of "well obviously" on both sides and never any data
  - ljf 3y ago
    When my wife first had ongoing symptoms after covid (before it had a snappy name), it was interesting how many people wanted to think that somehow she was making it up - and that being trapped in bed/on the sofa while I was out having fun with the kids was some sort of 'affectation'. As people understood what long covid was and does, people generally came around to the idea, but still (mainly online) people have this opinion that 'people must be making it up' - despite SARs being known to cause similar long term issues for some of those infected, and some people having long term impacts from Spanish Flu 100 years ago.
- deckiedan 3y ago
  Maybe part of the problem is that IBS(-like) symptoms, and many "fuzzy" / hard-to-diagnose ones (fatigue, etc) are also caused or exacerbated by anxiety and frustration and emotional distress. So if I'm not hyperchondriac, but am frustrated and stressed by (x) random symptom or covid related (y), or being off sick w/ "normal" Covid & struggling to regain energy, then if I'm emotionally distressed by it, then may develop IBS and fatigue symptoms on top of that - which then feeds into the loop... (Said as someone for the last several months currently struggling with a whole bunch of symptoms and not managing to get any helpful diagnosis or area I can work on to improve things...)
user568439 3y ago
My wife has long covid for 2 years with dozens of symptoms but not IBS.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  My wife didn't have long COVID, but did get a mild COVID infection (vaccinated, boosted). She didn't get IBS per se; however, we have noticed a few changes with respect to her digestive system: she seems to have developed a recent sensitivity to wheat gluten and dairy/lactose. Both now make her gassy and uncomfortable. The timing of it seems to be coincidental with COVID. Whereas we used to get pizza once or twice a month, it's basically been removed from our diet because it causes digestive issues. So it's possible that some folks might not be having severe IBS, but a spectrum of digestive issues related to lingering effects that trigger inflammation with certain proteins/sugars?
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Same thing happened to my wife, but it was long before COVID and not connect to any respiratory illness (or other illness we noticed). I suspect the cycle is <something triggers GI inflammation> -> certain foods exacerbate the condition -> until inflammation or underlying cause of inflammation has resided, condition continues. She has mostly returned to normal after losing many types of foods, but still can't eat beef or eggs in any quantity.
reedf1 3y ago
I have IBS - diagnosed long before COVID. I've had COVID a few times now and I experience very mild cold symptoms, but I have an IBS flare up each time. I would say my flare ups have increased over the past three years, I assume now that I must be fighting off a repeat variant occasionally. I would not at all be surprised if this just exposes existing IBS in people, maybe experiencing their first noticible flare up To any new sufferers of IBS, I would highly recommend Metamucil or any psyllium husk product. I regret not trying it sooner.
- ljf 3y ago
  It is so interesting the affects covid can have - when I most recently got covid I had a really bad joint pain flare up in my right hand and right ankle - like arthritis - it took about 6 weeks to pass, but to me it felt very linked to the covid infection. I may not have been, but it is the first time I've had symptoms like this.
- debacle 3y ago
  IBS is complicated. Psyllium tore me apart inside. In fact the thing that worked best was cutting out as much nuts and vegetables as possible. For other people it's pork or coffee or certain sugars. It's definitely a disease we need to learn more about.
  - reedf1 3y ago
    Yes definitely. Many things initially recommended to me were actively detrimental. There is no one size fits all treatment.
  - bena 3y ago
    This makes it look like IBS is more a symptom for a host of related diseases rather than a disease on its own. Which is the tricky thing about diagnosis that a lot of people don't really get. Symptoms are sexy, symptoms get the headlines, symptoms get treated. But sometimes multiple diseases present with similar symptoms. And for all we know about medicine and the human body, there is still a lot we are unsure about. So a lot of the time, symptoms are all we have to go on. And it sucks for you while we're figuring it all out, and I do sympathize, but I can't help but be fascinated by medicine and biology when I run into these situations.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
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33 points by elorant 3y ago

I have already seen several studies with the same scope and I know microbiome companies like Biomesight have already been collecting mass data on it. What is needed is research into treatments.

starbugs 3y ago

Honest question: How much is really known about long Covid and have there been studies investigating whether similar symptoms could be caused by the vaccines as well? (This is not a political statement. I am honestly interested in what the state of empirical evidence on the issue is and I found it hard to find out anything definite about it as a layman.)

ljf 3y ago
There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I have not heard of people saying they contracted long covid is response to the vaccine (without getting covid) - though I will admit I've tried to stay away from long covid news these days.
- starbugs 3y ago
  > There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I didn't say either/or.
badcppdev 3y ago
[flagged]
- starbugs 3y ago
  > You know a lot of people got Covid before the vaccines even existed... > So really you are asking if all the researchers are idiots No. I did not say either/or. I also don't think this is a productive way of having a conversation.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  This is a really aggressive and bad faith response. do better please
  - watwut 3y ago
    It is actually accurate reframing of the question. And yep, that question was likely to be politically motivated too.
    - starbugs 3y ago
      If you don't allow other people to ask questions, then I think it's more likely that you are yourself politically motivated. This question might be asked by someone who has someone near them suffering said symptoms after having been vaccinated or after having suffered from long Covid (or both). It's entirely unpolitical. Honestly, it's worrying that we still aren't able to speak about these things openly without this kind of comment even in a community like this.
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    Fine. But I was very sad that the questioner didn't do some googling before they introduced a spurious question about vaccines into a comment thread about long covid. 20% of the US population remain unvaccinated. I think that 60 million people is a sufficient control sample to be able to tell the difference between long covid issues and vaccine issues.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I've seen people claim that the vaccines ultimately cured their long covid. My suspicion is that a significant portion of long covid cases (and I'd be willing to bet a majority) are better described as anxiety disorders. I say that as someone with a large amount of personal knowledge on the subject of anxiety gained over a lifetime. Including lots of bowel issues.
- wayfinder 3y ago
  Well I could reasonably bike up one specific very steep hill near my place without downshifting much until I got covid. Then it took me more then half a year to get back to that point. It was a very slow recovery but most importantly, it could be quantitatively measured first from how far until I had to disembark my bike to walk up the rest of the hill to eventually the lowest gear I had to to shift into to get to the top without ever disembarking. I’ve never had any other flu-like sickness cause me to be weak for so long.
  - beagle3 3y ago
    I didn’t either, but a friend did take almost a year to completely recover what was (likely) the flu. One should remember that the flu has been around forever, so the flus you are comparing to were probably the 10th exposure - recovering from a new illness - and not being a small child - may take much longer.
- Izkata 3y ago
  If I remember right, something like 60% of people who claim to have long covid have never tested positive for covid. It could be they never got a test, or it was just too long to still be positive, but whatever the exact number was it was a really high percentage so I'm also leaning towards a large amount of it being psychosomatic or having some other cause.
- perbu 3y ago
  This is very typical. If you know a lot of about anxiety, you'll have an anxiety bias and will try to explain everything as anxiety. Psychologists will also perceive LC to be psychological. Immunologists tend to think it is immune related, gastrologs think it is gut-related, etc. Out of all these it's quite simple to dismiss the psychological explanations of LC. There are obvious physical changes found in various tissue and blood in LC patients. Changes that we can be reasonably certain aren't caused by mental issues.
Tobani 3y ago
How much do we know? Probably not as much as we might think we know. Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis. Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel
- psychlops 3y ago
  > Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid.
  - stetrain 3y ago
    Hm? If Group A and Group B have similar outcomes, then the outcome would seem to not be correlated to the difference between Group A and B. Whether or not the vaccine is a cause of long covid symptoms is not the same as whether the vaccine prevents long covid symptoms.
    - goda90 3y ago
      The real question would be can long covid symptoms develop from the vaccine alone, without covid infection.
      - stetrain 3y ago
        And that's tough to study in the general population since a lot of vaccine recipients have had covid infections, whether or not they even realized it or tested positive.
      - climatekid 3y ago
        This. It’s also very possible people can get long COVID from COVID, but it’s exacerbated and/or more likely for those who are vaccinated
linuxftw 3y ago
We don't know what systemic effects the vaccines have because the companies lied and said the vaccines stay at the injection site (aka, therefor they don't need to do more expensive testing). We also now know that the manufacturing process for some brands was different from the trial groups to general availability, the latter of which contained much more varied biological material. So, what could a bunch of unpure mRNA, RNA, and DNA strands coated in an immune system-evading 'nano-coating' do to your body? God only knows at this point, we didn't do the science to find out.
- Izkata 3y ago
  To downvoters: Point 1 was in a Pfizer document first leaked from Japan's government in mid 2021, officially released a year or more later. Point 2 (ish) was in a footnote in Pfizer's FDA approval notice, there were formulation changes in the inactive ingredients between the EUA and brand version for (IIRC) shelf-life stability. I don't remember details on the exact difference being in there though, and I don't remember differences between the trial and EUA versions (but scaling up can cause this by accident).
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Thanks, I'm not talking about the difference in the EUA and the Approved versions. I'm talking about the clinical trial vs all subsequent versions with regards to how the actual vaccine genetic material was produced. I can't find the reference at the moment, but I believe they used PCR to replicate the mRNA during the trials, and used the bacteria replication for the subsequent versions. Here's a professor giving testimony to his findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY
psychlops 3y ago
The symptoms remain untestable and therefore can be mixed with a host of other issues and diseases that are untestable. They will not be able to differentiate between a person with long covid, a person with long covid plus another untestable similar disease, or a person with an untestable similar disease for a long time, if ever.

willcipriano 3y ago

IBS is a illness that many people legitimately suffer, but also many hypochondriacs claim to have without evidence. The symptom profile of long covid is very close to lyme disease, another disease people actually get but also many more people claim to have without evidence. I'd like to see the overlap between long covid sufferers, IBS, lyme disease, people with a gluten allergy, PCOS etc and the level of evidence that they actually have those diseases.

Bjartr 3y ago
> also many more people claim to have without evidence I've long been curious what the ratio is in various situations like this. It seems the lynchpin for any argument for withholding support. I've only ever seen the equivalent of "well obviously" on both sides and never any data
- ljf 3y ago
  When my wife first had ongoing symptoms after covid (before it had a snappy name), it was interesting how many people wanted to think that somehow she was making it up - and that being trapped in bed/on the sofa while I was out having fun with the kids was some sort of 'affectation'. As people understood what long covid was and does, people generally came around to the idea, but still (mainly online) people have this opinion that 'people must be making it up' - despite SARs being known to cause similar long term issues for some of those infected, and some people having long term impacts from Spanish Flu 100 years ago.
deckiedan 3y ago
Maybe part of the problem is that IBS(-like) symptoms, and many "fuzzy" / hard-to-diagnose ones (fatigue, etc) are also caused or exacerbated by anxiety and frustration and emotional distress. So if I'm not hyperchondriac, but am frustrated and stressed by (x) random symptom or covid related (y), or being off sick w/ "normal" Covid & struggling to regain energy, then if I'm emotionally distressed by it, then may develop IBS and fatigue symptoms on top of that - which then feeds into the loop... (Said as someone for the last several months currently struggling with a whole bunch of symptoms and not managing to get any helpful diagnosis or area I can work on to improve things...)

user568439 3y ago

My wife has long covid for 2 years with dozens of symptoms but not IBS.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
My wife didn't have long COVID, but did get a mild COVID infection (vaccinated, boosted). She didn't get IBS per se; however, we have noticed a few changes with respect to her digestive system: she seems to have developed a recent sensitivity to wheat gluten and dairy/lactose. Both now make her gassy and uncomfortable. The timing of it seems to be coincidental with COVID. Whereas we used to get pizza once or twice a month, it's basically been removed from our diet because it causes digestive issues. So it's possible that some folks might not be having severe IBS, but a spectrum of digestive issues related to lingering effects that trigger inflammation with certain proteins/sugars?
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Same thing happened to my wife, but it was long before COVID and not connect to any respiratory illness (or other illness we noticed). I suspect the cycle is <something triggers GI inflammation> -> certain foods exacerbate the condition -> until inflammation or underlying cause of inflammation has resided, condition continues. She has mostly returned to normal after losing many types of foods, but still can't eat beef or eggs in any quantity.

reedf1 3y ago

I have IBS - diagnosed long before COVID. I've had COVID a few times now and I experience very mild cold symptoms, but I have an IBS flare up each time. I would say my flare ups have increased over the past three years, I assume now that I must be fighting off a repeat variant occasionally. I would not at all be surprised if this just exposes existing IBS in people, maybe experiencing their first noticible flare up To any new sufferers of IBS, I would highly recommend Metamucil or any psyllium husk product. I regret not trying it sooner.

ljf 3y ago
It is so interesting the affects covid can have - when I most recently got covid I had a really bad joint pain flare up in my right hand and right ankle - like arthritis - it took about 6 weeks to pass, but to me it felt very linked to the covid infection. I may not have been, but it is the first time I've had symptoms like this.
debacle 3y ago
IBS is complicated. Psyllium tore me apart inside. In fact the thing that worked best was cutting out as much nuts and vegetables as possible. For other people it's pork or coffee or certain sugars. It's definitely a disease we need to learn more about.
- reedf1 3y ago
  Yes definitely. Many things initially recommended to me were actively detrimental. There is no one size fits all treatment.
- bena 3y ago
  This makes it look like IBS is more a symptom for a host of related diseases rather than a disease on its own. Which is the tricky thing about diagnosis that a lot of people don't really get. Symptoms are sexy, symptoms get the headlines, symptoms get treated. But sometimes multiple diseases present with similar symptoms. And for all we know about medicine and the human body, there is still a lot we are unsure about. So a lot of the time, symptoms are all we have to go on. And it sucks for you while we're figuring it all out, and I do sympathize, but I can't help but be fascinated by medicine and biology when I run into these situations.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

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