<
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-09-27/long-covid-is-real-now-the-evidence-is-piling-up>
"Finally, the hunt for answers about long Covid is yielding some clues. A new
study, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Yale School
of Medicine and published in Nature, defines some critical differences in
certain biomarkers of people with long Covid. The next step is even more
critical: coming up with a way to cure them.
A massive number of people in the US are dealing with lingering symptoms. Two
new reports this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found
that in 2022, some 18 million adults said they had ever had long Covid, with
about 8.8 million currently suffering from the condition. In that time, roughly
1 million children had been affected — with about 360,000 children reporting an
ongoing case.
Those millions of people don’t all have the same symptoms — some experience
brain fog and extreme fatigue, while others may have shortness of breath or a
racing pulse — and their susceptibility to the disease is formed by a likely
long list of factors. Those could include their medical histories, their
previous vaccinations, prior infections, and even their genes.
Because of that, long Covid has defied simple explanations. And so far, doctors
must base their diagnoses on sometimes vague symptoms, rather than on a
molecule that can be measured, or a true biomarker of the disease. “Everyone
wants a single biomarker, everyone wants a single treatment,” says David
Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health
System. “That’s not realistic for long Covid.”
A more realistic hope is that researchers can one day offer physicians a kind
of “how to” manual for long Covid with a battery of tests to pinpoint what’s
gone wrong and, ideally, treatments. The new study is an important step towards
that goal, and should offer patients needed hope that answers could be on the
way.
In what the researchers believe is a first, they did a detailed study of the
differences between people with long Covid and those who are healthy (a mix of
those who never had Covid and those who recovered from their infection). They
wisely excluded anyone who had been hospitalized with Covid, so as not to
confuse explainable lingering symptoms—for example, those caused by lung damage
following a week of intubation — with the more mysterious ones that follow a
mild infection.
When they compared an exhaustive list of measurements, a few stood out as being
distinct features of long Covid. Among the strongest signal: Many people with
long Covid had much lower levels of cortisol, which regulates our sense of
alertness. In a healthy person, the stress hormone hits a nadir around
midnight, then rises to a peak somewhere between 6am and 8am. That lack of
cortisol could help explain the bone-crushing fatigue experienced by some
people with long Covid.
The researchers are already working to understand the root cause of that
hormone imbalance, work that ultimately should point to treatment strategies."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: September 28, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-89962624
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
