Video: Figuring Out Long COVID - with Emma Wall, Research Fellow at the Crick, 2025

YouTube Description
Join Emma Wall, a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Crick as she explains the science of long COVID, who it affects, its symptoms and how it can be prevented and treated.

Long COVID has affected up to 2% of the entire UK population in the last five years, but we still don’t fully understand this often-debilitating disease.

Emma explains how researchers are finding treatments for this new disease and how it’s important to embrace uncertainty to find solutions.

Emma Wall leads clinical research for the UCLH-Crick partnership on COVID-19. Her team are focused on improving understanding of the biology of long COVID to discover new ways to both prevent and treat this complex disease.
00:00 Intro
02:54 What is long COVID?
07:48 A patient's perspective
10:30 Who can be affected?
13:50 What is the cause?
19:06 Symptoms
23:43 Can it be prevented?
27:44 Treatment
33:07 What's being done?
36:18 Studies and trials
 
16:12 Antibodies transferred from Long Covid to mice caused some symptoms. When they sectioned the mice they found that the antibodies were bound to nerves.

Studies are about to be published on this (currently preprint). Does anyone remember that finding about antibodies binding to nerves?
 
Emma Wall has a presentation at Keystone next month titled 'An Innate Inflammatory Signature Is Consistently Enriched in the Plasma of Adults Living with Long COVID Across all Clinical Symptom Groups'

 
Nath is also presenting on neurological and vascular damage in long covid - hard to believe after the intramural study's results on 'effort preference'.

Avindra Nath, NINDS, National Institutes of Health
Neurological Complications in Long COVID and ME CFS
 
I watched half of Emma Wall's presentation and was unimpressed. It seemed to be a rag-bag account of all the things we have already heard of and one or two that we may not have but may not tell us much more. There seemed to be no attempt to critique or discriminate. If there is evidence for this many things being wrong then most of that evidence must be redundant and irrelevant. The tired old duo of viral persistence and autoimmunity came up.

The speaker sounded more like a journalist commentator than a scientist should. Yet there were the usual phrases you get from people who like to give an impression of being at the cutting edge: 'we think that...'. Who is we?
 
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