To help people with chronic Covid, scientists need to define it

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Almost from When the Covid pandemic began, there were reports of persistent, strange, and disabling symptoms in survivors. This syndrome came to be known as Long CovidFatigue, confusion, arrhythmia, intestinal diseases, and the complexity of other problems-which may persist for months after the infection starts, or appear several months after the infection ends-arouse people’s attention and sympathy, strong Patient enthusiasm, a lot of research interest, and huge government investment. In December last year, the U.S. Congress voted to fund a four-year study of long-term Covid with US$1.15 billion, and in February of this year, National Institutes of Health announced It will use these funds to create a Nested large research collection Check the experience of adults and children with the syndrome.

What makes long-term Covid research urgent is also why it is so challenging at this point. No one can determine the cause of it, except for the association it happened to people who have Covid-or those who think they have been infected but cannot prove it through testing. This makes it difficult to understand and therefore difficult to predict who is vulnerable: why one patient will have persistent symptoms and the other will not.

A sort of New research Data on long-term Covid patients in France, published in November JAMA Internal Medicine The work done by researchers from several universities and medical centers in France and Italy is complicating the problem. Researchers surveyed 26,283 patients to learn about their Covid infection experience and any long-term symptoms, and analyzed the antibodies in their blood samples to confirm their infection. Their findings: The best predictor of long-term Covid symptoms in patients is whether they believe they have been infected, not whether their infection can be confirmed in the laboratory.

The author writes: “Further research in this field should consider potential mechanisms that may not be unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.” “These patients may need to be medically evaluated to prevent another disease from being incorrectly attributed to’ Symptoms caused by long-term COVID’.”

This research does not overturn long-term Covid research: this field is too new. But for scientists studying this issue, it emphasizes the difficulty of setting a research agenda for such a new, diverse, and widespread syndrome. It presents the disturbing prospect of having to tell patients that the symptoms they are experiencing may not be caused by Covid at all and will not be underestimated.

For a long time, patients have brought new diseases to medical institutions—usually women, who often fit their bodies better than men between monthly menstruation and regular obstetrics and gynecology visits—and then be rejected by medicine as expected. Lyme disease is one such example; myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, another. The researchers determined that the long-term Covid would not go this way.

“As a doctor and as a woman, I have seen many of these undefined syndromes being ignored, and that patients have no choice but to be a quack. When their symptoms do have a pathophysiological basis,” Megan Lanney said the doctor and deputy dean of the Brown School of Public Health and the co-director of a new long-term Covid program there. “As an emergency doctor, I have witnessed patients with persistent symptoms after Covid infection. The lives of these patients have undergone tremendous changes. They deserve scientific rigor to solve this problem-for those who may have these symptoms. And for people who may not be caused by Covid, they also deserve some kind of explanation and treatment.”

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