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Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

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Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#81
post #38

It's quite possible that the causality goes the other direction, and a baseline population of brain disorders is being ascribed to the last notable thing that happened to them (which has also happened to ~ the entire population at this point).

Not really, since the survey paper notes that the EEG pathologies were detected in 69-96% of patients, including children. It is not plausible to propose that 69-96% of patients, including children, had undetected brain disorders and that was the direction of causality.

That’d only be true if the study population was a random sample of the general population.

If they’re only testing people with symptoms, the causality could easily go either way.

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#82
post #39
post #18

Today’s generations just do not get a break. Brain rot in the form of social media. Cognitive decline from possible long COVID. Constant exposure to microplastics from various sources (water contamination, water bottles, plastic wrapping, cars via tire breakdown). This timeline fucking sucks.

That view appears to discount just how horrible past generations had it. People living before around 1970 would have been in clover to have just those problems. Pick a decade in the past and it was generally pretty horrible.

  > would have been in clover to have just those problems
off-topic but this is the first time i've seen the idiom "in clover" before and had to look it up... interesting

[1] https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-clover/

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#83
post #77

The studies purporting to show evidence of long COVID, i.e. long term complications from COVID infections, are notoriously weak on rigor. Most make no attempt to control for the psychosocial impact of positive COVID diagnoses, like the isolation of quarantine, and the anxiety associated with being given a positive diagnosis for the infection. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattr…

That article is from 2021 when people were just dipping into studying long COVID. If you do a search for the term, there have been multiple studies from this year on the site you're linking characterizing the observed effects of long COVID. And we haven't been in quarantine for a few years now at this point. https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?q=long%20covid&allSite...

Nevertheless, it’s going to be hard to tease out causality. In addition to covid, there was the lockdown, and the tripledemic.

For example, I had two extremely mild cases of covid, but also long-not-covid symptoms from something worse (probably rsv, flu, or ???).

Similarly, there are a ton of psychological/developmental issues among covid-generation kids. For many, the lockdown and school closures were probably the main cause, but some probably have issues from covid itself.

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#84

Fuck, I recently had Covid and I've been having trouble recalling things. Every other day or so I'll spend 5-10 seconds remembering the name of something. It's possible this happened before I got Covid, though... I don't remember!

I found an extended period of rest was necessary before this symptom improved for me - but I’m >95% recovered now.

Hard to say whether the rest was actually necessary, but there’s reasonable evidence that it can help.

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#85
I thought I was depressed, but recently realised that I’m actually feeling off because of long COVID symptoms. The brain fog is pretty much constant, and I’m definitely more forgetful and confused than I used to be. There are some cardiac symptoms as well, but those interfere less with my day to day. I’d love to find a way out of this state, but it seems that my doctor doesn’t keep up with the latest research, and doesn’t seem to think that long COVID symptoms are a thing…

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#86
post #49
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean when you write 'UK researchers find', especially to a global audience (which UoKentucky PR dept may not particularly have but HN does (Hello from the ( the !) UK)) that it sounds more like the country UK than the.. no offence intended but not exactly world renowned university. (I've heard of Kentucky, probably my first time hearing of its university in its own right - though I might have assumed it had one.)

It seems like a fairly mediocre institution, at least in terms of research output: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene... Not entirely surprised we'd never heard of it.

a lot of southern schools publish in a different fashion. Most of my agricultural and husbandry knowledge of the area i live in comes from various universities .pdf files. My point is merely not publishing in Nature (or wherever) doesn't mean that serious research doesn't occur at that campus. Their "customers" may just be citizens of that state (or in some cases, that county).

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#87

UK meaning the University of Kentucky, not the United Kingdom.

[flagged]

I agree that the title should changed. Depending upon the reader's location, UK is a well known uni in the area. Also, the domain gave a good hint: uky.edu

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#88
post #48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading on the BBC that people were having to go overseas for critical surgeries because the NHS so woefully incompetent that people were on many years long waiting list. So maybe put "NHS excellence" on the shelf next to "Empire" as UK delusions that have long since passed. U of Kentucky is a pretty decent school, ~25k students with (from personal experience) excellent Civil Engineering and Chemistry scho…

The reason for that is around 30 - 50 years of continual gutting of the NHS, aggressive implementation of perverse incentives and anti-targets (e.g. "hospitals get less money if they fail to meet X standard of care, because they do not have enough money"), and overloading of staff duties to reduce costs (e.g. Physicians now performing duties that receptionists used to handle, the lack of work force meaning they have…

    > 30 - 50 years of continual gutting of the NHS
The date range feels a bit arbitrary here. The difference between 30 and 50 years is enormous.

Also, I will get no love for this comment: Highly developed nations have no one to blame but their own democracy for failing to stop the slide. Why hasn't the same decline happened in Denmark or Japan or most other highly developed democratic nations?

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#89

I thought I was depressed, but recently realised that I’m actually feeling off because of long COVID symptoms. The brain fog is pretty much constant, and I’m definitely more forgetful and confused than I used to be. There are some cardiac symptoms as well, but those interfere less with my day to day. I’d love to find a way out of this state, but it seems that my doctor doesn’t keep up with the latest research, and do…

Your brian fog more than likely comes from excess inflammatory cytokines as a result of specific T-cell populations depleted by covid.

Maybe try fixing that by regenerating part of your thymus glad with growth hormone—-either endogenous via HIIT workouts or externally administered (see the TRIIM trial).

Re: Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients

#90

I had strange symptoms post-Covid infection - my ability to recognize faces was very distorted and it seemed like everyone was familiar to me. It was like everyone I saw was an old high school acquaintance or maybe a celebrity, and I would get anxious because I didn't remember their name.

there was publications about viruses "causing the host to be more outgoing/in public" in the lead-up to the part of the disease where you're laid up with fluids leaking out of every orifice. I'm fairly certain some flu and iirc sars-ncov-2 were found to display this secondary (or tertiary) effect.

So you "catch" a flu. Before you know you've caught it, suddenly you want to go out to dinner, or go to a meetup of friends that you weren't planning on, or go to the movies / a concert.

Your misrecognizing faces seems like it might have felt the onus was on you to go up to people you saw and say "hey how've you been!" which, if you were infectious, would be detrimental to other people but beneficial to the virus. maybe long-covid or whatever left that part of your brain miswired and it took however long for the brain to fix the feature.

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