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Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

cidrap.umn.edu

121–130 of 195 posts

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#121
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the r0 is too high. Essentially everyone eventually gets Covid, vaccination or not, it's just that it's not worth testing continuously to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected.

> to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected No symptoms = not having COVID-19, GP was using the term correctly. Conflating SARS-CoV-2 with COVID-19 is a big annoyance I have with the general usage of "covid".

What? Googling "asymptomatic covid" seems to disagree with this assertion? Even the wikipedia page for it claims: "At least a third of the people who are infected with the virus do not develop noticeable symptoms at any point in time."

Has terminology moved on?

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#122

TLDR: > By day 300 of follow-up, 93 (8.3%) of 1,126 participants said they had received a diagnosis of long COVID by a provider. The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower. Interestingly, half of the participants in the study (which took place s…

It was also tested only in overweight and obese patients. Pretty much most people are overweight and obese in the US as well, I wouldn't draw any results from this study for people at normal weight.

That is a terrible conclusion to draw. BMI is a horrible indicator of health and to say that this study has no merit to "normal" people is idiotic. Also the jab against people in the US doesn't have any place in a scientific discussion of this study. Keep your prejudices to yourself next time.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent is saying it's the first evidence of TREATMENT. Incidentally, my bet is that many other viruses and bacteria have similar post acute symptoms. I wonder if these can also be measured and treated, perhaps even with metformin. I wonder how much of metformin's magical anti aging capabilities are actually due to fighting off latent infections.

Triple therapy is a treatment that proceeds it. Metformin isn’t a treatment, it’s a prophylactic.

Yes, a prophylactic treatment. I think my point stands, semantics aside.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not paying attention if you think this is the first evidence of long covid. There’s been significant strides towards understanding long covid in terms of microclots and viral persistence. https://cardiab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12933-02... For this pathology long covid can be treated with so called triple therapy for instance https://medhelpclinics.com/uploads/files/anticoagulant-tripl...

Parent is saying it's the first evidence of TREATMENT. Incidentally, my bet is that many other viruses and bacteria have similar post acute symptoms. I wonder if these can also be measured and treated, perhaps even with metformin. I wonder how much of metformin's magical anti aging capabilities are actually due to fighting off latent infections.

I don't know about bacteria, but post viral syndrome has been measured for decades with other viruses.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3320358/

Metformin doesn't have any "magical" anti-aging properties. It is effective for treating certain metabolic conditions such as type-2 diabetes but it has never been proven to extend lifespan in otherwise healthy humans (or any other higher primate). There are some significant negative side effects.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama45/

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#125
post #121
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to see if your zero-symptom-life is currently infected No symptoms = not having COVID-19, GP was using the term correctly. Conflating SARS-CoV-2 with COVID-19 is a big annoyance I have with the general usage of "covid".

What? Googling "asymptomatic covid" seems to disagree with this assertion? Even the wikipedia page for it claims: "At least a third of the people who are infected with the virus do not develop noticeable symptoms at any point in time." Has terminology moved on?

The disease and the virus are two different things in standard medical parlance.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#126
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the 95% confidence intervals of two variables have some overlap doesn't mean there's a >5% chance that the expected values of the two variables are the same. Consider two independent random variables X and Y; the chance that (a sample from X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X) is 10%, but the chance that (a sample of X is above the 90th percentile of the true distribution of X AN…

Mostly false. Overlapping confidence intervals does not mean > x% chance that the two variables' expected values are the same. If the intervals overlap, the difference is not statistically significant. Your example about random variables is largely misinformed. You're talking about things as if they are individual values. But we're talking about sample means. The probability that a sample mean for a large sample is a…

> If the intervals overlap, the difference is not statistically significant.

Demonstrably false. Obvious counterexample: the study in the OP, which has overlapping confidence intervals and a statistically significant difference.

Proof: just calculate the 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two means. You can figure out what the stddev was from half the confidence interval divided by the z-score for a 95% confidence interval, 1.96, and you get 1.02 and 1.30 for the two groups. Then the confidence interval is: (10.4 - 6.3) +/- 1.96*sqrt(1.02^2 + 1.30^2) gives [0.86, 7.34]. This does not include 0, therefore the difference is significant.

> The probability that a sample mean for a large sample is above the 90th percentile is massively lower than 10%, and depends on n.

I was trying to give a basic intuition about normal distributions with a simple example, the distribution of one sample is a simpler example of a different normal distribution. Yes obviously the distribution of an estimate of X given lots of samples is not the same as the distribution of a single sample, I never claimed it was.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#127

TLDR: > By day 300 of follow-up, 93 (8.3%) of 1,126 participants said they had received a diagnosis of long COVID by a provider. The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower. Interestingly, half of the participants in the study (which took place s…

If Metformin reduces the viral load, it probably does so throughout the entire body. Whereas intramuscular vacccination leads to good protection against serious disease through humoral (body serum) immunity, it does not, unfortunately, provide significant protection to the other immune compartments like the upper respiratory mucosal layer (served by a different set of antibodies than the humoral). So this is good. Th…

> good intranasal sars-cov-2 vaccine boosters

I like USSF's Qyndr vaccine candidate, it's an oral one. For mucosal immunity I've read that it doesn't matter whether the vaccine is targeting the upper-respiratory system or the gut.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#128
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Googling "asymptomatic covid" seems to disagree with this assertion? Even the wikipedia page for it claims: "At least a third of the people who are infected with the virus do not develop noticeable symptoms at any point in time." Has terminology moved on?

The disease and the virus are two different things in standard medical parlance.

I'm not sure I follow, honestly. If you are trying to hold colloquial use to a technical measure, good luck. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_naming has "While COVID-19 refers to the disease and SARS-CoV-2 refers to the virus which causes it, referring to the "COVID-19 virus" has been accepted." Meaning, that ship sailed.

More, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19, clearly talks about people having the disease but not being symptomatic. Such that you may be building a false divide? Yes, the virus is different from the disease. That does not imply that you only have the disease if you have symptoms.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#129
post #80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get a test to see if you actually avoided Covid?

We did normal Covid tests for work. Maybe I should do an antibody test. Would be interesting...

Unless you've been infected within the last 6 months or so at this point an antibody test is probably useless.

Re: Metformin shown to prevent long Covid

#130
post #76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big portion? Wow. I thought no-one escaped omicron BA.2

Can't say too much about it. Didn't really follow the whole Covid discussion and just continued my lifestyle. Eating healthy (fresh self-made food), doing sports and looking after a good mental state. Family and my circle did the same. Friends who have been vaccinated got Covid several times. But are also good now... My grandmom (89 years), also unvaccinated, didn't get Covid. Her sister got it (vaccinated). Both hea…

Attitudes like yours are why it kept spreading instead of petering out. I'm not saying that people need to get vaccinated, but I'm god damn sick of people not caring about spreading disease, whether vaccinated, or not. Humanity, as a whole, is in a war with disease. We don't need collaborators. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00319-9

> Healthy, young people who were intentionally exposed to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 developed mild symptoms — if any — in a first-of-its-kind COVID-19 human-challenge study.

That doesn't mean they weren't contagious.

> The first participants received a very low dose — roughly equivalent to the amount of virus in a single droplet of nasal fluid — of a virus strain that circulated in the United Kingdom in early 2020. Researchers anticipated that a higher dose would be needed to infect a majority of participants, says Andrew Catchpole, chief scientific officer of hVIVO. But the starting dose successfully infected more than half of the participants.

> The virus replicated incredibly rapidly in those who became infected. On average, people developed their first symptoms and tested positive, using sensitive PCR tests, less than two days after exposure, on average. That contrasts with the roughly five-day ‘incubation period’ that real-world epidemiological studies have documented between a probable exposure and symptoms. High viral levels persisted for an average of 9 days, and up to 12 days.

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