Live data from Hacker News

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

uknow.uky.edu

141–150 of 197 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not fully known but increasing evidence. Pretty stunning result is the discontinuity in all causes dementia for NHS seniors in Wales with the week of birth as the discontinuity point (week of birth is cutoff qualifier for a shingles vaccine)

I don’t understand. What do you mean by week of birth as the discontinuity point?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10246135/

> To provide causal as opposed to merely correlational evidence on this question, we take advantage of the fact that in Wales eligibility for the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) for shingles prevention was determined based on an individual’s exact date of birth. Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine.

Basically, the people born around that date are about as perfect a control-vs-experimental group split you can get in a large population.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I just blame everything on histomine dysfunction and marvel that the medical complex has been so reluctant to pick it up.[1] [1] https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/caution-advised-with-low-his...

Histamine and MCAS have been adopted by alternative medicine as an explanation for everything, but it’s not supported by science. Dieticians like the one you linked have been coming up with theories for how everything is caused by either too much or too little histamine for years. MCAS is particularly over diagnosed right now. The number of patients who think they have MCAS based on TikTok and Internet forums is so b…

I've never heard doctors worry so much I might change my diet as when I read the Wikipedia entry on histomine intolerance.[1] MCAS is one thing, maybe, but the primary diagnostic for histomine intolerance is whether symptoms improve with changes in diet. So, if the whole of TikTok changed their diets with positive results, why would that provoke derision from the medical community as opposed to curiosity?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histamine_intolerance

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

#144
Im 9 months into long covid. Just about recovered enough to start doing light cardio again. But during the first 5 months or so my brain was literally scrambled. At Christmas, simple trivia games were impossible. Recall of certain words that were usually available to me just didnt happen. It was awful, especially trying to keep my new job at the time. I also found myself doing things that I'd never done before, like leaving a tap running or heating a pan full of vegetables without any water in, as I'd forgotten I was midway though something.

Gradually, I began to get better, and this was in lockstep with my garmin's reporting of my HRV which had massively declined immediately after onset. At my worst, walking up one flight of stairs or showering would have me out of breath and send my heart racing.

Before all of this, I was an extremely fit young person (very high VO2 max and exercised daily). Im only just starting to get a resemblance of my former life back and I fortunately only had a mild case but it has really woken me up to the seriousness of post viral syndromes. I now actively avoid _any_ sick people, no matter how mild - my initial infection barely registered as a sore throat and sniffles.

I hope we really ramp up investigations into this field as I know there are a lot of people suffering in silence being fobbed off by archaic medical thinking in this area of medicine. Who knows what long term lasting damage has been done to my body

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

#145

Yep. People think I'm exaggerating when I say I've developed dementia. It's pretty intense (and terrifying) on the inside, but I've found ways to compensate to appear vaguely normal on the outside. Look, I'm even using multisyllabic words here! I also have the profound cardiovascular deconditioning described in other comments. So many hopes dreams flushed down the toilet, but people assume that I'm just lazy and stup…

What symptoms do you feel recently?

Are they improving?

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

#146

Yep. People think I'm exaggerating when I say I've developed dementia. It's pretty intense (and terrifying) on the inside, but I've found ways to compensate to appear vaguely normal on the outside. Look, I'm even using multisyllabic words here! I also have the profound cardiovascular deconditioning described in other comments. So many hopes dreams flushed down the toilet, but people assume that I'm just lazy and stup…

> So many hopes dreams flushed down the toilet, but people assume that I'm just lazy and stupid.

Reminds me of:

> The culprit behind “the germ of laziness,” as the South’s affliction was sometimes called, was Necator americanus —the American murderer. Better known today as the hookworm, millions of those bloodsucking parasites lived, fed, multiplied, and died within the guts of up to 40% of populations stretching from southeastern Texas to West Virginia. Hookworms stymied development throughout the region and bred stereotypes about lazy, moronic Southerners.

* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

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

#147

Yep. People think I'm exaggerating when I say I've developed dementia. It's pretty intense (and terrifying) on the inside, but I've found ways to compensate to appear vaguely normal on the outside. Look, I'm even using multisyllabic words here! I also have the profound cardiovascular deconditioning described in other comments. So many hopes dreams flushed down the toilet, but people assume that I'm just lazy and stup…

did you just have covid once before developing these symptoms? If so, when did you get it?

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

#148

I visited two friends recently when I was back in Ireland. They had both been fit climber/orienteering types. Both now incapacitated with long covid. Both had been vaccinated. I went for a very short very slow walk with one of them. She wears a fancy Garmin which beeps when her heart rate goes over 100bpm. We walked for 15 mins and it went off. I really hadn't realised quite how real and quite how incapacitating long…

[flagged]

I can tell you are bad faith because you either a. haven't done the most basic research to figure out the answer to that question or b. have and don't like the answer so you go around Just Asking Questions.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be rude, but if there is no way of reliably testing for long covid, you might as well say it could be anything, including depression ? How is a doctor, who could see hundreds of patients a week supposed to know ?

Well, how is a doctor who doesn't even know about it supposed to either diagnose it or rule it out? Depression is also something you cannot just reliably diagnose from a blood sample or something, so just going "depression!" as soon as someone starts talking about brain fog and being listless seems unfair. Most Doctors think in categories, they don't want to challenge what they already know and have been practicing f…

judging by my wife's experience, a woman could go to the ER with a gunshot wound and leave with a prescription for an antidepressant.
Post reply on HN