6 ms·

Long Covid is associated with cognitive slowing

68 points by belltaco 3y ago

thenerdhead 3y ago
These numbers don't look so great long term. Especially the no PCC group. The good news is that recent research suggests we can start aggressively targeting virus in trials: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01724-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01724-6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.27.23293177v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.27.23293177v... There are a lot of exciting trials going on for many different antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, immunomodulators/immunotherapy, and even novel molecules to help clear out viral persistence. I am starting to collect these budding treatments & patient stories as they come on a website here: https://www.lctreatments.com/ https://www.lctreatments.com/
- treprinum 3y ago
  There was some recent study where most patients who received monoclonal antibodies regressed rapidly so I am not sure that's a good pathway. The hypothesis is that the covid antibodies are quite nasty so the body creates anti-antibodies that in turn resemble the original virus wrt certain effects and one ends up in a cycle of doom that first needs to be broken before one starts getting better.
  - thenerdhead 3y ago
    Link the study.
    - treprinum 3y ago
      Can't find the paper as it was in 2021 but here is from someone who did it: https://old.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/comments/1acpmjc/im_one_of_those_who_tried_monoclonals_mabs_in/ https://old.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/comments/1acpmjc/i...
      - thenerdhead 3y ago
        Are you referring to this preprint? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.21.567575v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.21.567575v1 Regardless, you trust a single redditor's comments with no verifiable proof over peer-reviewed science and on-going clinical trials?
        treprinum 3y ago
        It's one datapoint. Not sure why I should by default distrust somebody whose life was ruined by it and is essentially involved in a human-style reinforcement learning crowdsourcing trying to figure out how to recover by sharing what worked and what didn't.
        thenerdhead 3y ago
        Trust but verify comes to mind here. I have personally tried to verify this because I work on a project to bring all stories(good, bad, neutral) on novel therapeutics + Long COVID and I have yet to be successful in verifying this with the poster over a couple months. They told me previously to reach out to a specific Long COVID advocacy group and when I did, that group replied with very limited data as no one had really tried it. Now they are claiming it is a Facebook group with this new post, so something is not adding up here. Let alone all the other public anecdotal and research evidence suggesting the opposite or being neutral. I will continue to try to verify, but I hope you can see why we cannot just trust what is said on the internet as truth.
gitfan86 3y ago
[flagged]
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Cognitive slowing squares with the depression hypothesis.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    More like with neuroinflammation and brain hypoperfusion? Both present and measured in long covid sufferers. M1 polarized microglia, damaged endothelium, dysfunctional mitochondria...
- belltaco 3y ago
  > just that there is no real evidence of this being a real disease What does this even mean? How do you define a 'real' disease? Sounds like a god of the gaps fallacy to me. Just because we don't understand and can't treat it yet doesn't mean it's not a real disease. At the very least it looks like a cluster of various kinds of diseases.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Looking at the history of things like fibromyalgia and CFS (remember when that was called “Incline Village Yuppie Syndrome” to dismiss it?), I think your god of the gaps comparison is quite apt and it seems like it’s especially used to minimize diseases which affect people unlike the speaker. It’s no coincidence that all three of these are associated with women, for example.
- AnthonBerg 3y ago
  There is no evidence that your claims are worth anything. There are tons of known mechanisms, biomarkers, documented physiological alterations and on and on and on. Do take note that “there is no evidence for x” is an absolutely gargantuan claim. If you intend to carve swathes of epistemological foundations into the void you better have something a little sharper and a little more substantial.
DidISayTooMuch 3y ago
Not sure if others have experienced this, but you tend to forget nouns (object names, names of people, places, etc) after getting hit with COVID. I googled about this and something called "anomic aphasia" came up. I often caught myself saying "that thing" many times because I couldn't recall the names of even basic objects or street names, etc after getting hit with Omicron. Just curious if others have experienced this as well.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Sounds like having children. My mum could never get our names right and I could never understand why. Had children, now I do exactly the same thing. Still don't really understand why though tbh.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rubicon33 3y ago
Since 2019 I've been: - Vaccinated for COVID once - Infected with COVID 3 times - Infected with RSV once - Infected with unknown ?? upper respiratory, two times. I am absolutely less "sharp". It feels like both my cognitive and physical ability have taken a serious blow. I'm far less creative, less excited about work, less interested in challenging topics, and less capable of solving complex problems. I will sometimes stare at my IDE and find myself unable to write a single line. It takes minutes of reorienting my mind to find context again and beginning to put some stuff down. And that's for languages and projects that I already know. I'm trying to learn a new programming language now in a new domain, and finding it very challenging. I'm not sure if this is the direct result of COVID, or if it's just part of getting older... maybe it's both. All I can say is that it came on quickly and definitely feels like something changed in how my brain works. Sucks.
- wslh 3y ago
  The obvious answer to this that I believe you already know is to check with health specialists. The part of being older and/or changing interest is another factor to take into account. Since we are slowly understanding more things about COVID and other diseases you can also try new things and no believe 100% in what is published. Trial and error is a good problem solving skill. For example, engaging in new activities that "play" with one or more of our senses (e.g. music).
- hef19898 3y ago
  Vaccinated three times, had it twice. The first time, no long term effects. The second time, well... I think it is getting better, but I feel you. Stuff I know I know the solution to, I know I can do in the blonk of an eye just seems to be hidden behind some wall of fog. Takes sheer willpower to get through that, then it is done in a heart beat. After that, my energy seems to be gone. Wasn't a problem at work, for now. Physically, well, I am low on stamina. Did hit the gym since, I don't feel like 2 hours of boxing are a particularly good idea at the moment. Sucks, you are right. My significant other so told me it goes away, and sometimes I feel close to break through whatever that shit is. Still better of than a friends son: 10 years old, unable to follow school since October, unable to do more than 2 hours worth learning per day, unable to excercise. All this despite being fully vacinated three times, the second time Covid hit him, it hit hard. I can only imagine how it would be without vaccination...
NoblePublius 3y ago
[flagged]
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102434/attachment/1502c707-9f5b-4679-8e62-020dd4342f43/mmc1.pdf https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102434/a... Pre-existing conditions For 111 of 194 PCC patients, we also obtained their history of pre-existing neurological/psychiatric conditions. 31 of them (27.9%) had pre-existing neurological or psychiatric conditions. 16 of them had a history of depression (n=14) and/or anxiety (n=3). One had a suspected addiction to alcohol. One had a history of bulimia. Nine of them had various neurological conditions, for example, migraine, tinnitus, trigeminal neuralgia, rotatory vertigo, amyloid angiopathy, fibromyalgia, polyneuropathy. Unfortunately, we did not acquire the information about preexisting conditions from our controls but based on their self-reported no history of neurological and psychiatric diseases, suggesting that they would have no pre-existing conditions.
  - NoblePublius 3y ago
    “Self reported” is exactly the standard of evidence I expect from Covid researchers. Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Next up please control for vaccine status. Long vaccine anyone?
coolThingsFirst 3y ago
For me COVID somehow coincided with the most depressive period in my life. The brain fog and tiredness was something that I had never experienced before. My context window was so narrow felt like I was operating at 2 percent capacity. It’s normal for depression to cause fatigue but literally cleaning my apartment once a month would drain me for week and a half. I love to journal I’d sit down and somehow words weren’t flowing. The entire system was haywire. I ate well, started even going to the gym but only at the end of summer 2023 did my energy slowly come back. I was also mistakenly attributing this to getting older. My mind is now alpha zero and depression is gone. Crazy times pandemic plus depression plus bad SWE market. It was basically hell and I thought Id never recover. Health is the most important thing in this life.
GuB-42 3y ago
I am somewhat skeptical about the long covid thing. Not that the disease doesn't exist of course, but of the relationship with covid specifically. To put it simply, we all got in contact with covid at some point. Some were asymptomatic, some mistook it for a cold, and some were confirmed cases. Plus there are vaccines, that are said not to be as effective at preventing long covid than they are at preventing severe (accute) covid. Some even say the vaccine itself can cause long covid-like symptoms. So how many of these case really "long covid" and not just a condition no one really took into account before a global pandemic affected us all in a relatively short amount of time. There are some conditions that are known to get triggered with any kind of infection (ex: EBV), or other kind of disturbances. Covid is one of them, but so is the flu, or anything else really. And then, there were the lockdowns, raise of remote work and all the resulting social changes. People took some weight, others lost some, sleep patterns, eating habits, etc... have changed for many people. All these could be potential triggers for some condition that while not caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a result of the pandemic. I say all that because of a personal experience. In late 2020, I got unwell, very unspecific symptoms which felt mostly psychosomatic, and it lingered for months, with ups and down, and a global trend towards improvement. When I talk about it, "long covid" is usually the first suggestion, and I would believe it, except I didn't get covid at the time. No contact, no symptom, PCR and IG tests negative, etc... it was before I got vaccinated. I finally ended up getting covid for (I think) the first time last year, and it was a typical, milder than average case, with none of the "unwell" symptoms resurfacing. I still don't know what happened to me, and why, though the lifestyle changes caused by the pandemic may have something to do with it. But had it happened after a covid infection, I am sure it would have been attributed to it.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  You are skeptical that a condition named after the pathogen itself cannot be attributed to long term sequelae? There are so many studies that help answer all the questions you have on this topic. Peer reviewed and from reputable journals. LitCovid is very helpful here.
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  Quite a few studies have found the ME/CFS 50% of Long Covid tracks with ME/CFS from other sources, a condition caused by a number of different mostly infectious challenges to the body including quite often EBV. So in this regard you are right the symptoms and a lot of the biological changes track ME/CFS. In this case we know the causing infection so we may as well keep that information because it does help in studying it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278546/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278546/ But about half of Long Covid is other things, like heart attacks, strokes and cancer all of which are significantly up since the pandemic started across most of the world and showing up in excess deaths. Its also worth keeping in mind the post Polio diseases only impacted about 1% of people who contracted the disease. Just because it only impacts a small number of infections over the world it can be a very large number of people especially when people are catching Covid so often.
emmacharp 3y ago
As the internist told me when, after a long and strange bout with covid at the very beginning of the pandemic (March to July 2020), he diagnosed me with fibromyalgia: "In the end, we may never know if you really have fibromyalgia or not. What matters is will the medication make you feel better." And boy, did it work. Low dose amitriptyline changed my life. PS: I was feeling like shit before covid. Covid only made it so much worse that it became impossible to ignore. For me and the multiple doctors I've seen at the time.

68 points by belltaco 3y ago

These numbers don't look so great long term. Especially the no PCC group. The good news is that recent research suggests we can start aggressively targeting virus in trials: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01724-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01724-6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.27.23293177v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.27.23293177v... There are a lot of exciting trials going on for many different antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, immunomodulators/immunotherapy, and even novel molecules to help clear out viral persistence. I am starting to collect these budding treatments & patient stories as they come on a website here: https://www.lctreatments.com/ https://www.lctreatments.com/

treprinum 3y ago
There was some recent study where most patients who received monoclonal antibodies regressed rapidly so I am not sure that's a good pathway. The hypothesis is that the covid antibodies are quite nasty so the body creates anti-antibodies that in turn resemble the original virus wrt certain effects and one ends up in a cycle of doom that first needs to be broken before one starts getting better.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  Link the study.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Can't find the paper as it was in 2021 but here is from someone who did it: https://old.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/comments/1acpmjc/im_one_of_those_who_tried_monoclonals_mabs_in/ https://old.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/comments/1acpmjc/i...
    - thenerdhead 3y ago
      Are you referring to this preprint? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.21.567575v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.21.567575v1 Regardless, you trust a single redditor's comments with no verifiable proof over peer-reviewed science and on-going clinical trials?
      - treprinum 3y ago
        It's one datapoint. Not sure why I should by default distrust somebody whose life was ruined by it and is essentially involved in a human-style reinforcement learning crowdsourcing trying to figure out how to recover by sharing what worked and what didn't.
        thenerdhead 3y ago
        Trust but verify comes to mind here. I have personally tried to verify this because I work on a project to bring all stories(good, bad, neutral) on novel therapeutics + Long COVID and I have yet to be successful in verifying this with the poster over a couple months. They told me previously to reach out to a specific Long COVID advocacy group and when I did, that group replied with very limited data as no one had really tried it. Now they are claiming it is a Facebook group with this new post, so something is not adding up here. Let alone all the other public anecdotal and research evidence suggesting the opposite or being neutral. I will continue to try to verify, but I hope you can see why we cannot just trust what is said on the internet as truth.

gitfan86 3y ago

[flagged]

lupusreal 3y ago
Cognitive slowing squares with the depression hypothesis.
- treprinum 3y ago
  More like with neuroinflammation and brain hypoperfusion? Both present and measured in long covid sufferers. M1 polarized microglia, damaged endothelium, dysfunctional mitochondria...
belltaco 3y ago
> just that there is no real evidence of this being a real disease What does this even mean? How do you define a 'real' disease? Sounds like a god of the gaps fallacy to me. Just because we don't understand and can't treat it yet doesn't mean it's not a real disease. At the very least it looks like a cluster of various kinds of diseases.
- acdha 3y ago
  Looking at the history of things like fibromyalgia and CFS (remember when that was called “Incline Village Yuppie Syndrome” to dismiss it?), I think your god of the gaps comparison is quite apt and it seems like it’s especially used to minimize diseases which affect people unlike the speaker. It’s no coincidence that all three of these are associated with women, for example.
AnthonBerg 3y ago
There is no evidence that your claims are worth anything. There are tons of known mechanisms, biomarkers, documented physiological alterations and on and on and on. Do take note that “there is no evidence for x” is an absolutely gargantuan claim. If you intend to carve swathes of epistemological foundations into the void you better have something a little sharper and a little more substantial.

DidISayTooMuch 3y ago

Not sure if others have experienced this, but you tend to forget nouns (object names, names of people, places, etc) after getting hit with COVID. I googled about this and something called "anomic aphasia" came up. I often caught myself saying "that thing" many times because I couldn't recall the names of even basic objects or street names, etc after getting hit with Omicron. Just curious if others have experienced this as well.

IshKebab 3y ago
Sounds like having children. My mum could never get our names right and I could never understand why. Had children, now I do exactly the same thing. Still don't really understand why though tbh.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rubicon33 3y ago

Since 2019 I've been: - Vaccinated for COVID once - Infected with COVID 3 times - Infected with RSV once - Infected with unknown ?? upper respiratory, two times. I am absolutely less "sharp". It feels like both my cognitive and physical ability have taken a serious blow. I'm far less creative, less excited about work, less interested in challenging topics, and less capable of solving complex problems. I will sometimes stare at my IDE and find myself unable to write a single line. It takes minutes of reorienting my mind to find context again and beginning to put some stuff down. And that's for languages and projects that I already know. I'm trying to learn a new programming language now in a new domain, and finding it very challenging. I'm not sure if this is the direct result of COVID, or if it's just part of getting older... maybe it's both. All I can say is that it came on quickly and definitely feels like something changed in how my brain works. Sucks.

wslh 3y ago
The obvious answer to this that I believe you already know is to check with health specialists. The part of being older and/or changing interest is another factor to take into account. Since we are slowly understanding more things about COVID and other diseases you can also try new things and no believe 100% in what is published. Trial and error is a good problem solving skill. For example, engaging in new activities that "play" with one or more of our senses (e.g. music).
hef19898 3y ago
Vaccinated three times, had it twice. The first time, no long term effects. The second time, well... I think it is getting better, but I feel you. Stuff I know I know the solution to, I know I can do in the blonk of an eye just seems to be hidden behind some wall of fog. Takes sheer willpower to get through that, then it is done in a heart beat. After that, my energy seems to be gone. Wasn't a problem at work, for now. Physically, well, I am low on stamina. Did hit the gym since, I don't feel like 2 hours of boxing are a particularly good idea at the moment. Sucks, you are right. My significant other so told me it goes away, and sometimes I feel close to break through whatever that shit is. Still better of than a friends son: 10 years old, unable to follow school since October, unable to do more than 2 hours worth learning per day, unable to excercise. All this despite being fully vacinated three times, the second time Covid hit him, it hit hard. I can only imagine how it would be without vaccination...

NoblePublius 3y ago

[flagged]

thenerdhead 3y ago
https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102434/attachment/1502c707-9f5b-4679-8e62-020dd4342f43/mmc1.pdf https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102434/a... Pre-existing conditions For 111 of 194 PCC patients, we also obtained their history of pre-existing neurological/psychiatric conditions. 31 of them (27.9%) had pre-existing neurological or psychiatric conditions. 16 of them had a history of depression (n=14) and/or anxiety (n=3). One had a suspected addiction to alcohol. One had a history of bulimia. Nine of them had various neurological conditions, for example, migraine, tinnitus, trigeminal neuralgia, rotatory vertigo, amyloid angiopathy, fibromyalgia, polyneuropathy. Unfortunately, we did not acquire the information about preexisting conditions from our controls but based on their self-reported no history of neurological and psychiatric diseases, suggesting that they would have no pre-existing conditions.
- NoblePublius 3y ago
  “Self reported” is exactly the standard of evidence I expect from Covid researchers. Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Next up please control for vaccine status. Long vaccine anyone?

coolThingsFirst 3y ago

For me COVID somehow coincided with the most depressive period in my life. The brain fog and tiredness was something that I had never experienced before. My context window was so narrow felt like I was operating at 2 percent capacity. It’s normal for depression to cause fatigue but literally cleaning my apartment once a month would drain me for week and a half. I love to journal I’d sit down and somehow words weren’t flowing. The entire system was haywire. I ate well, started even going to the gym but only at the end of summer 2023 did my energy slowly come back. I was also mistakenly attributing this to getting older. My mind is now alpha zero and depression is gone. Crazy times pandemic plus depression plus bad SWE market. It was basically hell and I thought Id never recover. Health is the most important thing in this life.

GuB-42 3y ago

I am somewhat skeptical about the long covid thing. Not that the disease doesn't exist of course, but of the relationship with covid specifically. To put it simply, we all got in contact with covid at some point. Some were asymptomatic, some mistook it for a cold, and some were confirmed cases. Plus there are vaccines, that are said not to be as effective at preventing long covid than they are at preventing severe (accute) covid. Some even say the vaccine itself can cause long covid-like symptoms. So how many of these case really "long covid" and not just a condition no one really took into account before a global pandemic affected us all in a relatively short amount of time. There are some conditions that are known to get triggered with any kind of infection (ex: EBV), or other kind of disturbances. Covid is one of them, but so is the flu, or anything else really. And then, there were the lockdowns, raise of remote work and all the resulting social changes. People took some weight, others lost some, sleep patterns, eating habits, etc... have changed for many people. All these could be potential triggers for some condition that while not caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a result of the pandemic. I say all that because of a personal experience. In late 2020, I got unwell, very unspecific symptoms which felt mostly psychosomatic, and it lingered for months, with ups and down, and a global trend towards improvement. When I talk about it, "long covid" is usually the first suggestion, and I would believe it, except I didn't get covid at the time. No contact, no symptom, PCR and IG tests negative, etc... it was before I got vaccinated. I finally ended up getting covid for (I think) the first time last year, and it was a typical, milder than average case, with none of the "unwell" symptoms resurfacing. I still don't know what happened to me, and why, though the lifestyle changes caused by the pandemic may have something to do with it. But had it happened after a covid infection, I am sure it would have been attributed to it.

thenerdhead 3y ago
You are skeptical that a condition named after the pathogen itself cannot be attributed to long term sequelae? There are so many studies that help answer all the questions you have on this topic. Peer reviewed and from reputable journals. LitCovid is very helpful here.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
Quite a few studies have found the ME/CFS 50% of Long Covid tracks with ME/CFS from other sources, a condition caused by a number of different mostly infectious challenges to the body including quite often EBV. So in this regard you are right the symptoms and a lot of the biological changes track ME/CFS. In this case we know the causing infection so we may as well keep that information because it does help in studying it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278546/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278546/ But about half of Long Covid is other things, like heart attacks, strokes and cancer all of which are significantly up since the pandemic started across most of the world and showing up in excess deaths. Its also worth keeping in mind the post Polio diseases only impacted about 1% of people who contracted the disease. Just because it only impacts a small number of infections over the world it can be a very large number of people especially when people are catching Covid so often.

emmacharp 3y ago

As the internist told me when, after a long and strange bout with covid at the very beginning of the pandemic (March to July 2020), he diagnosed me with fibromyalgia: "In the end, we may never know if you really have fibromyalgia or not. What matters is will the medication make you feel better." And boy, did it work. Low dose amitriptyline changed my life. PS: I was feeling like shit before covid. Covid only made it so much worse that it became impossible to ignore. For me and the multiple doctors I've seen at the time.