Increased galanin-galanin receptor 1 signaling, inflammation, and insulin resistance are associated with affective symptoms and CFS... Maes et al

• Wasim Talib Mahdi Al Masoodi,
• Sami Waheed Radhi,
• Habiba Khdair Abdalsada,
• Mengqi Niu,
• Hussein Kadhem Al-Hakeim,
• Michael Maes

Maes, the senior author, has a long history of producing papers that are not quite solid.
Most of the others are from Iraq, which is not to say they can't produce a useful paper, but they probably have not had a lot of contact with a range of more established ME/CFS researchers and so may have been quite influenced by Maes.

Niu has an affiliation with an odd collection of departments in Chengdu, China including 'Key Laboratory of Psychosomatic Medicine':

So, there could be something in the core findings and it's worth taking a look, but some of the interpretation is likely to be a bit off.

 

We've seen the fatigue of ME/CFS described as a 'neuropsychiatric' symptom before and I try not to be offended by it. I find it a term that is quite hard to get to grips with. I think it is supposed to be used for some sensations arising from disordered brain function. So there are two possible problems with the term when applied to ME/CFS

1. it's assuming something about the cause of the sensations that people with ME/CFS feel that might not be true
i.e. the depression and anxiety may have nothing to do with disordered brain function and be a normal and pretty rational response to the circumstances e.g. worried about how to pay the bills, grieving the losses; the fatigue may be arising from things happening outside of the brain, as may be the pain.

2. it may be assuming that the disordered brain can become ordered if only the person had a bit of will power and was a bit smarter about how they live

 

I don't think you are mistaken. But, I wouldn't be too bothered about the words around the numbers, they probably are based on all sorts of odd ideas. I feel sorry for the people with Long Covid in Karbala, Iraq, and the rest of us too who have to put up with unfounded assumptions, but there's so much around already that this paper probably doesn't make that much difference.

As usual, there is a circularity in the link between emotional symptoms and Long Covid. Having emotional symptoms after Covid-19 qualifies someone as having Long Covid: presumably anxiety and depression would count for the two required symptoms. It should come as no surprise then that the Long Covid group has higher average ratings on measures of anxiety and depression.

60 Long Covid patients; 30 controls who had had Covid. Criteria for Long Covid seems as good as most.

The Long covid group had had, on average, a worse acute illness: longer duration, higher peak temperature, lower minimum blood oxygen saturation. The mean lowest blood oxygen saturation in the Long Covid group was 80%, way less than the 93% of the controls. That's interesting, but I don't know how relevant it is to people with the ME/CFS pattern of symptoms.


So, the Long covid group is likely to have been, as is usual, a mixture of people, including people recovering from a moderate to severe Covid-19 illness and/or people with an ME/CFS symptom pattern and/or people who have lost their sense of taste or smell or mental sharpness and feel sad about that.


Mean time from acute illness to study inclusion was 16 to 17 months.
The sex ratios were not similar between the two groups (2/3 male in the controls and around 1/2 male in the LC group)
They say they adjusted results for age, sex and BMI.

Here are the results:

HOMA2IR is a measure of insulin resistance and HOMA2%S is a measure of insulin sensitivity.

 

We've got to get researchers to stratify their "Long Covid" samples into more descriptive subsets. This lumping is just hopeless.