Article in The Scientist: Mechanisms of Long COVID Remain Unknown but Data Are Rolling In

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
No one really knows how or why long COVID happens, who is most susceptible to it, or how to treat it. Doctors can barely agree on a definition for the condition, with the only consensus being that to qualify as a case of long COVID, symptoms have to persist for more than 12 weeks after the onset of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. After months of diligent efforts from patient advocacy groups, long COVID is now recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a legitimate condition, and earlier this year, the US National Institutes of Health announced a dedicated $1.15 billion fund to advance research on the matter.

“The main challenge at this point is to nail [it] down at a phenomenological level,” says Ryan Low, a computational neuroscientist at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, one of Akrami’s coauthors on the cytokine preprint, and a long COVID sufferer himself. “Just what are the relevant systems it involves? . . . What are the different signaling systems we care about? What organs are affected?”
Includes
Long COVID Studies Around the Globe

https://www.the-scientist.com/featu...-remain-unknown-but-data-are-rolling-in-69066
 
Just look at the number of studies, their sample sizes, time spans, hard physiological basis, and how quickly they got up and running.

Compare and contrast with the situation for us over the last 60 years.

I mean, I am very happy that LC is getting serious attention, because it should and is also likely to pay off for us too. And we do get a decent mention:
Several researchers, Akrami and Russell Low included, are also looking to other post-viral syndromes to try and understand long COVID. The symptoms of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a condition marked by debilitating exhaustion and cognitive problems, are very similar to those of long COVID, and ME/CFS can also arise after viral infections. “I think the underlying pathophysiology [of ME/CFS], while complex and incompletely understood, is similar” to that of long COVID, says Low. Several research efforts are now exploring possible links between ME/CFS and long COVID.

But it is more than a little depressing and angering at how quickly medicine can move in the right direction when they feel like it.
 
Just look at the number of studies, their sample sizes, time spans, hard physiological basis, and how quickly they got up and running.

Compare and contrast with the situation for us over the last 60 years.

So far I have felt frustrated by how poor quality many of these Long Covid studies are, that too many are repeating the failures of previous ME research and, though I hope not, I feel there is a possibility that people with Long Covid in a few years time will be no better off than we are now.

Having said that it is distinctly possible that there are good studies happening, that there are good researchers who have sought to learn from the ME/CFS literature, just that they are not the ones that have rushed to publish as soon as possible.
 
To me, and I haven't looked at much, only what pops up on here, it looks like LC is simply being used as an opportunity to gain grants for old recycled and failed pet theories.

In some cases to be used as marketing for what would seem to be warehouses full of 'treatments' that didn't work, for anything.

A distressing number of things seem to be virtually identical to things that were marketed, and pushed, as 'treatments' for ME over the last 30 years, with the same 'research' and claims being made.

It doesn't look like any serious attempt is being made, by most, to achieve anything, other than gaining grants and or making money from the marketing of supplements. Or, of course, to promote the idea that LC is a psychological issue and should be treated with.......

Agenda driven research, whatever the agenda may be, just as long as it's not to help patients, seems to be the 'thing'.

Of course I may be wrong, I have largely given up looking at such stuff after becoming somewhat despondent at the 'quality' and areas of 'research' that makes it on to various threads here for discussion.
 
It would be great if alongside reports of the $1.15B funding there were maybe some follow-up, or just a simple notice, of the fact that there has been no apparent work done at all, nothing has been made public, it's not even clear if anyone is actually working on it. It's been 6 months and not a single word or hint of a plan.

Because the idea of spending $1B+ on research won't do a damn thing, it's actually doing the work that will. The lack of criticism journalists lay on medicine is very disappointing, it's so damn naïve, no one ever seems to think that medicine has to be held accountable, so no ever even tries.
 
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