Jama - Prevalence and Characteristics with Post-COVID-19 Condition Among Non-hospitalized Adolescents... - Selvakumar, Wyller et al, 2023

The paper is discussed in the latest TWiV's Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (haven't listened to it yet):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPd4psAtw-g

ETA: Have listened to it now. It begins at approximately 21.15. Dr. Griffin's main comment is that the paper shows the WHO criteria for Long Covid are too broad.

 

Exactly. I'm not sure exactly where it would be added, but certainly in the contributions section or somewhere it would have been appropriate to mention it. I don't know if it would have been formally required but it seems odd to have left it out completely. ADDED: Or in the methodology section, depending on Recovery Norway's actual role.

 

exactly--this is the paper's main finding.

 

unfortunately for him, it does indeed say that long covid is unrelated to covid-19 infection--technically, it doesn't say it doesn't exist, just that it's unrelated to infection.

 

I started reading this with skepticism, thinking surely it can't be that brazen.

Yup. Literally just as immoral behavior as any of the worst things the tobacco companies did. It's hard to believe this is basically common and accepted in medicine but damn it, this is really happening. And has likely always been this bad.

 

The same can be said of the early criteria for CFS that only had fatigue like Sharpe's Oxford, or the least rigorous application of Fukuda. And obviously the whole of MUS/conversion disorder They are useless by way of being too generic. Which is exactly what the BPS model does: always generic, yet somehow still has to be tested for every possible combination.

Useless as far as delivering outcomes for patients. Clearly very useful to the people who make sure this never happens.

 

I was also wondering if now they are going to mass-produce these. And then they can say: see, quite a lot of studies have come to the same conclusion.

 

Flocking/shoaling ? Grants and data are the attractants and the group behaviour based on instinctive following of a small number of individuals, ultimately leading to circular citing and mutual congratulations on coming to the same conclusion because that's where their collective limited thinking takes them.

 

I don't really think it deserves its own thread, it's a garbage "study" not worthy of discussion. But there is... this:

Trust in sources of information on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic's first wave and incident persistent symptoms in the population-based CONSTANCES cohort: A prospective study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399923001836

Where they are basically doing the same "Long Covid has nothing to do with COVID":

I don't think it should be viewed as "coordinated action" so much as an alignment of interest. Tobacco companies in some ways colluded among themselves, but they would have done the exact same on their own because they all wanted the exact same outcome. Ironic that this is the very process that destroys trust in medical experts. Zero self-awareness, it's all navel-gazing and the pursuit of career advancement, at any cost.

It's becoming really easy to see how medicine used to believe in such ridiculous stuff like the Humours. The whole profession is entirely political everywhere the biology isn't fully understood. It has two standards: very high, and the absolute bottom pits.

I said it a few times before, but it will really be necessary to liberalize medicine away from a natural monopoly that doesn't have real obligations. Health cannot be left to such a dysfunctional and inept system, it is simply too important to be decided by such an inhumane faceless bureaucracy that clearly doesn't see individual lives as important. If we had the same standards in aviation, dozens of planes would crash per day and people would just shrug it off. It's not even believable.

Credit to James Coyne for flagging this. It's a June 2023 paper:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1645040925494616065

 

I don't think it's insignificant that the organisations picking up long COVID implications / extent recently were insurers.
This is groundhog Day .

 

Trial by Error by David Tuller Further Thoughts on that JAMA Network Open Article and Estimates of Long Covid Prevalence

quote:

The study provided an example of how applying loose criteria loosely is likely to yield a heterogeneous sample that includes an unknown number of people with something—but not necessarily the specific condition of interest. By then fashioning a problematic comparison group, the JAMA Network Open authors created an opportunity for themselves to question the links between an actual coronavirus infection and subsequent disabling symptoms.

That also left them with an opening to propose the need to study non-pharmacologic treatments—the kinds of approaches, like graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavior therapy, that have already been studied ad nauseam for the cluster of illnesses variously called ME, CFS, ME/CFS and other iterations

 

The study is all over the news today in Norway. The main message is that Long Covid has nothing to do with a Covid infection and that the diagnosis is useless.

One of the articles:

forskning.no Norsk studie avdekket long-covid også hos ikke-smittede: - Diagnosen ikke hensiktsmessig
google translation: Norwegian study revealed long-covid also in non-infected people: - The diagnosis is not appropriate

quote referring to Professor Wyller:

The researchers' main conclusion is that infection by covid-19 plays a role in some complaints, such as taste, smell and partly fatigue. But for most ailments there are other things that matter more.

The researcher clarifies that it is important to accept that a problem is a problem, regardless of why it occurs.

- We cannot ask the patients to pull themselves together or think differently. But if we are to do something about these problems, we need to know more about the cause. Now we are one step closer, says Bruun.

 

A google translated quote from another (paywalled) article from today about the study:

- The tendency to experience strong symptoms is in turn linked to being a woman and certain personality traits.

Other important risk factors for long covid were:

- Those who felt socially isolated had a greater risk of suffering
- Those who were not physically active had a greater risk of suffering

- Loneliness was significant. It came out both in conversations and when they filled in forms, says Vegard Bruun Wyller.

 

Self absorbed as we Norwegians tend to be; another article about this study is focusing on it being one of the world's most talked about paper. No critical questions from this news site either, and it's an academic one.

Some of the high traffic to this paper is due to a youtube conspiracist who has talked about the paper in one of his videos. It also has been picked up by people who are against vaccines. I guess this has now become a good thing..

Khrono Norsk forskningsartikkel tar av. Er en av verdens mest omtalte
google translation: Norwegian research article takes off. Is one of the world's most talked about

Professor Wyller comments in the article:

- It is perhaps because this is a particular phenomenon that many people are interested in. Lots of research I guess not that many people are interested in. I have worked with fatigue post infection for 20 years, long before Covid. At that time we were a few people in the world who worked with this, and we referred to each other, but there was not a lot of interest in it. But then comes covid and this long covid phenomenon that suddenly everyone is concerned about. Where we had a unique opportunity to contribute, because we knew a lot about late effects from before.

 

why today? It was released weeks ago already...

 

Professor Wyller got an interview in the newspaper Aftenposten on Thursday which was shared by several other newspapers that are part of the same media organisation.

Also The Norwegian News Agency had an article about the study shared the same day which was picked up by other news sites. Probably based on a press release from Wyller, I'd assume.