Opinion Long COVID: a new word for naming fibromyalgia?, 2023, Xavier Mariette

Long COVID: a new word for naming fibromyalgia?
Xavier Mariette

Long COVID is the name given to a syndrome comprising a wide variety of symptoms persisting more than 3 months after acute benign COVID-19, with a prevalence ranging from 10 to 80%. Symptoms are very close to fibromyalgia.

Several studies showed that long COVID prevalence was much higher after the first wave of the pandemics and was associated to the fact of thinking having had COVID rather than having had really COVID. Thus, it was the stress of the first wave with the lockdown and not the consequences of the infection that probably induced this high frequency of long COVID. Numbers of studies tried to find objective biological abnormalities for explaining long COVID but none of them could be replicated and convincing.

The concept of long COVID seems to be a repetition of history of medicine, in which the doctors and the society gave different names to fibromyalgia with the objective of trying to highlight the fact that fibromyalgia could be a somatic disease with a well understood pathophysiology and to avoid to focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. In conclusion, “to name is to soothe” as said by Roland Barthes. However, “Naming things wrongly adds to the world's unhappiness” was saying Albert Camus.

Thus, the term of long COVID, which suggests viral persistence of impaired immune response to the virus, is unappropriated and should be replaced by fibromyalgia-like post-COVID syndrome. Research on the psychosomatic and somatic mechanisms involved in these fibromyalgia-like post-viral syndromes must be encouraged.


Link | Paywall (Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases)

 

Professor Xavier Mariette, Rheumatology Department, Université Paris-Saclay, Hôpital Bicêtre, 78 Avenue du Général Leclerc, Le Kremlin Bicêtre, 94270, France - seems to publish a lot on Sjogren's and Rheumatoid Arthritis, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?scisbd=2&q=Professor++"Xavier+Mariette"&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5.

 

Yep, didn't find anything yet, call of the search.

 

Invoking Roland Barthes and Camus in adjacent sentences, and Xavier Mariette MD is not even a psychiatrist?

So, I suspect that he himself must be suffering from Long Covid which is provoking this confusion of assertions. Which French writer should I quote about that denial?

 

That's just how professionals do it: when it's hard and you don't find it easily, give up.

Oh, wait, the opposite of that. Uh.

 

Mariette is a well known rheumatologist who has contributed usefully to the literature on rheumatoid disease and has taken a particular interest in B cell depletion and practical issues around antibody levels.

It is disappointing to see him author this.

Maybe I should look in to submitting a reply to Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.

 

If you pen a response, you may be interested in pointing Prof Mariette to the new French official report on long Covid and post-infectious syndromes that I have tried to briefly summarize here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/news-from-france.18119/page-4#post-502432

 

I cannot find it on the College Library electronic access.
It does not appear in the table of contents for November.
If I search on Mariette it comes up but 'page not found'.

 

The abstract is visible, yes, but I am unable to access a full paper.

 

I've sent it to you on chat.