Long Covid Weekly: 10/2 - 10/9
80% of people with Long Covid having difficult with daily activities
Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash
Hi everyone,
Short newsletter this week. It looks like as we enter the holiday season, research news could be slowing down.
Research
Post-Acute Effect of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on the Cardiac Autonomic Function
TL;DR:
‘Orthostatic hypotension (OH) was demonstrated in 39.3% of post-COVID-19 participants in comparison to 3.2% of the control subjects, (p<0.001). Similarly, significant abnormal blood pressure response to the handgrip test was observed in the post-COVID group compared to the controls (73.1% vs 16.1%, respectively, p <0.001). Additionally, abnormal heart-rate response to HUT was higher in the post-COVID group (35.7%) compared to 12.9% in the controls (p=0.04) (Table 3). However, none of our subjects fulfilled the postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) diagnosis criteria.’
Plasma cytokine levels reveal deficiencies in IL-8 and gamma interferon in Long-COVID
TL;DR:
‘To evaluate the possibility that dysregulated secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines can be observed in the context of long COVID, we measured levels of 13 plasma cytokines via Luminex assay in samples from 12 donors diagnosed with long-COVID and compared them to 15 healthy controls (Table 2). All the statistically significant differences between the long-COVID cohort and healthy controls represented reductions in cytokine levels rather than the expected increases based on previous studies of other post-viral syndromes‘
‘Based on our results we propose that immune exhaustion perpetuates long-COVID due to the seemingly complete reduction of IFNγ and IL-8, as well as significant decreases in IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-13, and IL-17.‘
Effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy on functional and structural connectivity in post-COVID-19 condition patients: A randomized, sham-controlled trial
TL;DR:
‘In this randomized sham-controlled trial, we identified longitudinal changes in cerebral network functional and structural connectivity during cognitive and emotional recovery in post-COVID-19 patients. We found that improvements in cognitive function induced by HBOT is correlated with reorganization and restoration of connectivity patterns between large-scale cognitive control networks.‘
‘The primary limitation of this study is the heterogeneity of clinical characteristics observed in this cohort, along with the relatively small sample size (symptom severity, time from infection, vaccination status, and post-COVID-19 symptoms) which may limit the ability to generalize from our findings.’
Sleep symptoms are essential features of long-COVID – Comparing healthy controls with COVID-19 cases of different severity in the international COVID sleep study (ICOSS-II)
TL;DR:
‘We observed a high frequency of long-lasting sleep disturbances characterised by difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep and excessive daytime sleepiness in C-19 cases, which contrasts with previous studies that have failed to assess the frequency of sleep symptoms in PASC.’
‘Our findings suggest that severe/life-threatening C-19 cases are more prone to more complex PASC with a higher prevalence of concomitant symptoms than those with milder C-19.’
Media
Long COVID is still disabling millions of Americans
TL;DR:
‘Of the nearly 24 million adults in the U.S. who currently have long COVID, more than 80% are having some trouble carrying out daily activities, according to CDC data released Wednesday.’
‘The agency's report also confirms that people are developing long COVID symptoms regardless of age, race, gender or previous disability.’
Strokes, heart attacks, sudden deaths: Does America understand the long-term risks of catching COVID?
TL;DR:
‘In a study that included patients from the initial wave of the pandemic, scientists from the University of Florida found that survivors of severe COVID-19 had two-and-a-half times the risk of dying in the year following illness compared to people who were never infected. Of note, nearly 80% of downstream deaths were not due to typical COVID complications like acute respiratory distress or cardiac causes.’
‘“The degree of immune escape and evasion is amazing right now, crazy,” Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing told Nature a few days ago. In a preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed, Cao et al. found that new subvariants like BQ.1.1, CA.1, and especially XBB, are the most antibody-evasive strains to date. “These results suggest that current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not provide sufficiently broad protection against infection,” they wrote.’