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Attributes and predictors of long Covid

nature.com

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Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#51

Post by Izkata »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #14
brb92 wrote: post #10

> For the reduced logistic regression model, the score was given by the following formula: S = 0.259503 × NumberSymptoms + 0.055457 × age − 0.633310 × sex − 3.20 (where sex is encoded as 1 − female/2 − male) Where ‘NumberSymptoms’ corresponds to the sum of different symptoms experienced over the first week among the list of 14 symptoms reported on daily logs. This score was then transformed to a probability using the…

Gender differences wouldn't be unheard of. Also, in that model, being male reduces your predicted probably of long COVID. This model does seem kinda wacky though. Just throwing in 1 symptom, age of 30, and female gives a probability of 13% which seems high. I'll have to read the paper more carefully to figure out what exactly that probability is supposed to mean.

GP is saying that the model appears to directly contradict the abstract, which says females are more affected.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#52

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

Izkata wrote: post #50
DrBazza wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fast-tracked vaccines It would be accurate to say that these vaccines have been developed in the optimal time, and vaccines are usually 'slow-tracked'. Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. Things that slow down all vaccine development: funding, finding volunteers for testing…

> Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. They were approved for emergency use, which means skipping tests for long-term side-effects, because those usually take around two years. Every other vaccine has been around for a while and gone through this.

Not to mention this is these are the very first mRNA vaccines deployed in this scale.

We’re going to be honest about long-term risks, and possibilities, we can’t just hand waive this away.

It’ll be fine. But pretending that long term risk isn’t there because we don’t want it to be isn’t very sciencey.

It’s wrong to equate these to previous vaccines in multiple ways.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#53

Post by sdenton4 »

Retric wrote: post #44
sdenton4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acceptance of some of those strange observations relied on the older generation - with strong emotional attachment to the old way of looking at things - dying off.

That’s extremely overstated. Einstein for example complained about spooky action at a distance, but didn’t disagree with the results. “ Quantum mechanics is very worthy of respect. But an inner voice tells me this is not the genuine article after all. The theory delivers much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secret. In any event, I am convinced that He is not playing dice.” So, he was completely on boa…

It's a dynamic not entirely confined to quantum physics in the 1930s, and there's a range of graciousness involved. It's a side effect of the paradigm shifts described by Kuhn: What happens to the old guard? Some will adapt to the new paradigm, some will enjoy tenure and let their students carry the new torch, and some will join the church in denouncing these heretics who deny the primacy of the earth. (And will happily say as much in their grant reviews!)

Also keep in mind that the stakes are higher when it's the academic's core area of contribution which is under attack. Einstein's contributions to large scale physics were secure. If instead good we're playing dice at the scale of solar systems, threatening to obviate his primary contributions and consign his name to the dustbin of history, the reaction may have been a bit different.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#54

Post by kragen »

Closi wrote: post #47
m0llusk wrote: post #35

One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency, but this study apparently didn't even check Vitamin D levels. That seems like a serious oversight.

It's not an oversight, it's a limitation of how the study was conducted - you can't check for Vitamin D levels through an app. But what you can do in this study, is have a dataset with a good size (4m people from the UK!) which allows for much broader analysis than would be possible through other means. Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical, and widescale self-reporting will provide insights not ot…

> Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical

On at least two occasions China has swab-tested 10 million people in a single city within a week, when covid re-occurred in a city where it had been thought to be extirpated. I don't think blood testing is twice as difficult as swab testing. So, I don't think it's impractical per se. It's just impractical in the UK.

You know what's impractical? 2.7 million people dying and an unknown fraction of the survivors suffering disabilities and injuries such as diabetes, heart attacks, and cerebrovascular attacks.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#55

Post by kragen »

jdjdn827js wrote: post #38
m0llusk wrote: post #35

One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency, but this study apparently didn't even check Vitamin D levels. That seems like a serious oversight.

> One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency. Is it? How exactly is vitamin D deficiency measured and diagnosed? How much variance / tolerance is there between people. Most importantly does COVID impact Vitamin D levels? This may be a serious oversight. Or it may be that the Vitamin D thing is pseudoscience.

> Is it?

Yes, in the usual sense medical researchers use the term "risk factor", e.g., having a heart attack is a risk factor for having one of your great-grandparents die of a heart attack. Taking vitamin D probably won't reduce your covid risk, but it might, and it's a low-risk intervention that probably isn't harmful, so you should do it anyway unless you have some contraindication such as a high risk of kidney stones. The best review I've seen of the research literature is this post:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-mo...

(That post isn't medical advice, but this comment clearly is.)

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#56

Post by mannykannot »

regularfry wrote: post #8
lofi_lory wrote: post #2

> Long COVID was characterized by symptoms of fatigue, headache, dyspnea and anosmia and was more likely with increasing age and body mass index and female sex. Experiencing more than five symptoms during the first week of illness was associated with long COVID. A bit disappointing information. So, first week severity indicates risk for long covid? Or is it multiorgan involvement independent from severity?

You could get over the 5-symptom limit in this study just with knackered lungs.

If you do, you might have more pressing concerns that Long Covid if you are in the first week of an infection, and yet you might also be at higher risk for that as well.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#57

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jdjdn827js wrote: post #38
m0llusk wrote: post #35

One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency, but this study apparently didn't even check Vitamin D levels. That seems like a serious oversight.

> One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency. Is it? How exactly is vitamin D deficiency measured and diagnosed? How much variance / tolerance is there between people. Most importantly does COVID impact Vitamin D levels? This may be a serious oversight. Or it may be that the Vitamin D thing is pseudoscience.

Not a lot of people seem to know, but in the UK VitD supplements are recommended by the NHS for practically everyone in Winter.

AIUI, VitD is involved in T-cell production and so is needed to maintain our immune systems.

This is our course not medical advice.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#58

Post by airhead969 »

timr wrote: post #39
airhead969 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas.

> The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas. None of these are "known effects". If you count "things that have happened to someone after contracting SARS-CoV2" as "long covid", then an entire universe of medical maladies is included in the set that may or may not be causally related. There are specific examples of patients with severe cases of SAR…

Look at the cadaver studies.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#59

Post by InitialLastName »

airhead969 wrote: post #58
timr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The known effects of LC are horrendous: permanent damage to the brain, heart, lung, kidneys, liver, and pancreas. None of these are "known effects". If you count "things that have happened to someone after contracting SARS-CoV2" as "long covid", then an entire universe of medical maladies is included in the set that may or may not be causally related. There are specific examples of patients with severe cases of SAR…

Look at the cadaver studies.

Cadavers from Covid 19 have (by definition) not had very much time to recover from long covid.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#60

Post by Retric »

sdenton4 wrote: post #53
Retric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s extremely overstated. Einstein for example complained about spooky action at a distance, but didn’t disagree with the results. “ Quantum mechanics is very worthy of respect. But an inner voice tells me this is not the genuine article after all. The theory delivers much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secret. In any event, I am convinced that He is not playing dice.” So, he was completely on boa…

It's a dynamic not entirely confined to quantum physics in the 1930s, and there's a range of graciousness involved. It's a side effect of the paradigm shifts described by Kuhn: What happens to the old guard? Some will adapt to the new paradigm, some will enjoy tenure and let their students carry the new torch, and some will join the church in denouncing these heretics who deny the primacy of the earth. (And will happ…

Not to completely disagree, but Einstein won the 1921 Nobel prize for photoelectric effect which demonstrates the quantum nature of light. I was using him as one of those pioneers which where faced with the universe acting strangely rather than anything to do with relativity.

So, yes some people will object long term, but it’s important to keep their objections in context. Plate tectonics is a slightly more recent revolutionary idea that actually converted most skeptics, but the early objections where reasonable and the actual conversion was quick once the idea approached it’s modern form.

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