We Just Got More Evidence That Long COVID Is a Brain Injury
We Just Got More Evidence That Long COVID Is a Brain Injury
sciencealert.com
We Just Got More Evidence That Long COVID Is a Brain Injury
113 comments
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I wish people cared about dealing with covid still. Once corporate America got that sign off not to care there was no going back.
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Seriously. I spent 2 days in the hospital last week with bilateral pulmonary embolisms after having COVID the middle of last month. I was NOT otherwise at risk for clots. A terrible surprise that I'll no doubt be recovering from for some time. I'm on a blood thinner for 6 months.
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Fixed your ED at least 😊👍🏻
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Ooo interesting. The parallels with CFS are fascinating.
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I wasn't even aware of that. chronic fatigue syndrome was actually real.
I thought I was just like side- depression.
is there anything known about CFS?
what causes it or how long it lasts or anything?
I know nothing about it except for like a comedy sketch from the 2000s at some point.
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Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.
Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @Neurologist@mander.xyz is specialised in it.
Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).
As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.
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CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.
It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.
That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.
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We all get tired
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What’s CFS?
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Chronic fatigue syndrome.
It's another one like long covid where so much of the medical community thinks it's all in people's heads and not real, but unlike long covid it's less prevalent and thus studied less. We still don't know what it is.
There's even some hopes that figuring out long covid might lead to new ways to look into what cfs really is.
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great.
remember when all the politicians and people who control things got covid?
What a totally normal and cool planet this is.
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They were already shitheads.
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A bull in a porcelain shop is not gonna do much damage if the shop is next to empty.
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If it makes you feel any better, those demographics were already suffering from lead gas exposure.
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I'm still afraid of long-c. I insisted that we wore masks in airports and on flights when we took a trip last month. We live life in a normal fashion everywhere else (because we're vaxxed and boosted), but I wasn't willing to risk that environment.
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Why just planes? Surely this would apply to all public transport.
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If they're US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they've ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it's likely the only one available to them.
Signed, -An American
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Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
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I walk to work ten minutes to work. Partner and I each have cars. We take uber when we want to avoid driving.
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Do masks help the wearer? Last time I heard it didn't. Probably wrong.
Either way, good for you...even if it only helps others that's a good reason!
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As someone with long COVID, I can vouch the debilitating mental effects. I was teaching math to 4th through 8th grade students when I got it. I can remember standing in a classroom talking about a lesson and just having my mind go blank in mid sentence. I couldn't function. Not knowing what I was talking about or even where I was. Thankfully the students where very understanding and someone would finish my point I was making. I still suffer from it yet today, nearly 2 years later.
I have respiratory issues despite every CT scan showing nothing more than a couple of small pneumonia scars form long ago. I should be able to breathe just fine with no reduction of lung capacity. It stems from a lack coordination with my diaphragm - It runs backwards when I exert myself causing shortness of breath. Another sign of probable brain injury. And despite using a therapy tool to try and fix the issue, at best it just helps a little.
The upshot is I have pretty much stopped doing a lot of things I used to do because of the difficulties breathing and I spend a lot more time away from people due to an unreasonable fear of COVID.
It has caused me to retire earlier than I wanted to. And my life has greatly changed - and not for the better either.
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Sorry you're going through all of that. There obviously aren't any long term studies on it yet, but hopefully things will improve more and more over time.
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According to my Pulmonolgist - Nope. Her observations of all her patients over the years is that if you don't get over it in about a year, you don't get better. And she has been seeing more COVID patients than her "normal" patients for several years now. Long term care is going to be a real problem for society going forward.
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*a reasonable caution of encountering people with an unreasonable response to covid
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Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19.
Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
[..]
In living brains of those with long COVID, however, conventional MRI studies have shown no structural abnormalities in the brainstem.
Do these people not proof-read their own articles?
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Normal hospital-type MRI scanners can't see inside the brain with the kind of chemical and physical detail we need. But with 7T (7 Tesla) scanners, we can now measure these details
Not the best article, but I think what they are trying to say over multiple paragraphs is that new higher resolution MRI machines can see the damage that normal lower resolution MRI can't see
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Diana from YT Physics Girl has long COVID. Her very loving husband takes care of her. We all wish them the best and any kind of recovery.
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So what I'm hearing you say is we should ignore it and act like all the people who correctly point out how dumb we're being are assholes.
113 comments
All those people who refused to take COVID seriously have a lot of blood on their hands.
Shout out to Physics Girl Dianna. Who is still bedridden.
STILL? I haven't checked in months. That's crazy.
They don't remember. On account of their brain injury.
No, not everyone who got long covid didn't take it seriously. But the people who were super spreaders or spread misinformation are certainly to blame.
But fortunately a lot of them don't care about such things as the quantity of blood on their hands, so news like this won't worsen their lives or self-image.
They got their Applebees. Does’t matter.