Prevalence and predictors of long COVID among non-hospitalised adolescents and young adults: a prospective controlled cohort study, 2022, Wyller et al

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.
Absolute cringe. Dude talks about himself like he's some sort of authority. He's accomplished nothing and is as much on the wrong side of this as HIV deniers are with AIDS. This "study" is just another useless trash that will be completely forgotten.

For all the talk about a participation trophy generation, this is an actual failure trophy profession. Failure is actually rewarded, coddled and encouraged. What a complete mess.
 
The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has an article about the study today. It's paywalled but title and the two first sentences are:

New study: Long Covid may be caused by lockdown

Long-term covid symptoms affected as many young people who had not had covid-19 as those who had been infected, according to a new Norwegian study.
- It is unlikely that the lockdown didn't affect young people, says the expert on the subject.

(I don't know who the expert who comments the study is. But it's a strange comment if the expert is Swedish, as they never had a lockdown, but do have long Covid)
 
Letter to the Editor of Journal of Medical Virology in response to this paper in JAMA: Post-COVID syndrome, the real matter of debate (2023, Journal of Medical Virology). Pay-walled, so some clips.

Commentary —

some authors reported that the persistence of a complex of symptoms, which they named post‐COVID conditions (PCCs), should be associated with factors far from the causative SARS‐CoV2 infection, even related to psychological backgrounds.

We took into account a recently published paper [this thread's paper] as an outstanding example of how science may dismiss post‐COVID syndrome as a “psychic” rather than an actual, postinfective syndrome with numerous symptomatic similarities with CFS.

The first question that was raised while reading the paper was how the authors had introduced a novel terminology such as postinfective fatigue syndrome (PIFS) and attached this to references regarding the Fukuda et al.'s CDC classification of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS); perhaps, the authors intended CFS instead of PIFS. It is a bit misleading when addressing particular symptoms such as fatigue, usually associated with CFS and post‐COVID, inasmuch as fatigue is erroneously intended as a mood disorder in people suffering from the psychological consequences of the COVID pandemic.

it is particularly burdensome to diagnose fatigue as a consequence of a previous SARS‐CoV2 infection with respect to psychological impairments due to COVID‐19 restrictions. From this perspective, the methods used to recruit and investigate patients are particularly crucial.

They recalculate relative risk of LC in Covid-negative patients. Here they parenthesise a 95% confidence interval but I can't see a range given. I assume the error is the range, but may be misunderstanding the statistical reporting in this section.

Considering that 184 subjects had PCC among 379 SARSCoV2‐positive individuals, the authors evaluated the presence of PCC with an error of ≥5% (5.03%, 95% confidence interval [CI]), and in SARS‐CoV2‐negative subjects, PCC with a very high margin of error (10.61%, 95% CI). For PIFS, the margin of error was 3.49% (<5%, 95% CI) for SARS‐CoV2‐positive subjects, yet the error was >5% (5.84%, 95% CI) for SARS‐CoV2‐negative subjects. This would mean that the screening of typical symptoms associated with postCOVID in subjects without signs of infections was presumptively flawed.

we recalculated the actual relative risk (RR) to associate PCC with the absence of a previous COVID‐19 infection; recalculation was done taking into account the statistical errors (1.1686; 95% CI = 0.8546–1.5980), indicating that PCC may be a collection of symptoms not related to SARS‐CoV2 infections even from the beginning, that is, the authors erroneously included subjects with symptoms resembling a PCC but without any relationship with current SARS‐CoV2‐negative swabs. [...] For PIFS, the recalculated RR in controls was 0.2909 (95% CI = 0.2122–0.3987).

Concluding —

Psychological ailments and impairments coming from pandemic restrictions cannot be included in a post‐COVID syndrome if a post‐COVID complex of symptoms deals with a postinfectious action on the infected organism, that is, immune dysregulation, immune‐thromboembolic effects on the microvasculature, and so on.

Unfortunately, this approach fails in focusing fatigue as a proper biomarker of a postCOVID syndrome due to possible confounders in the research rationale. Fatigue is a typical symptom of CFS, which recalls many features of post‐COVID (due to damages generated by the viral infection), rather than mood disorders.
 
Letter to the Editor of Journal of Medical Virology in response to this paper in JAMA: Post-COVID syndrome, the real matter of debate (2023, Journal of Medical Virology). Pay-walled, so some clips.

Commentary —









They recalculate relative risk of LC in Covid-negative patients. Here they parenthesise a 95% confidence interval but I can't see a range given. I assume the error is the range, but may be misunderstanding the statistical reporting in this section.





Concluding —
It's a pity one of the authors has an interest in ozone therapy.
 
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