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The Causes of Long Covid

science.org

51–60 of 134 posts

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why then do SSRIs also work on fibromyalgia, Morgellons, Chronic Lime and Chronic Fatigue?

Morgellons isn’t a real disease. It’s a mental health condition. SSRIs do not “work on” those other conditions, but depression is highly comorbid with serious chronic illnesses. SSRIs improving some symptoms is to be expected when depression symptoms overlap with the condition.

I'm somewhat open to this line of thinking, but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc.

I've seen healthy, active and successful people be affected, where the cause of "long covid" seems unlikely to be psychological. But there is no denying that, shall we say "a certain type" of person seems to be overrepresented in these cases, and for them it is very attractive to attach the label "long covid" to something that previously existed.

I guess that until we have discovered the biological mechanism underlying this phenomenon, it will be hard to cleanly separate these two cases, but from what I've seen I find it likely that this bipartition really exists.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#53
post #42

[flagged]

Not necessarily fake. Mind/body homeostasis is WAY more complicated than that. To use a computing analogy, which doesn't map perfectly onto the body, if consciousness awareness is userland, you can have things go wrong which are localised in ring 0 - brain drugs will be to some degree effective on those, that doesn't mean it's fake or made up. In reality there are fuzzy boundaries and feedback loops everywhere. SSRIs…

Thank you, these overly simplistic first-order-only analysis of extremely complex phenomena drive me nuts.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#55
post #47
post #44

Before you can investigate the causes of an illness, you have to define it. Otherwise, you’re chasing an ever-shifting cloud of ambiguous symptoms, any of which could have different causes. The article opens with this admission, so I’m not stating anything new here. The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a…

Interesting. Someone should (or maybe have?) run a cluster analysis on the symptoms to define more specific subgroups. But I suppose getting access to the required health data at that scale is nontrivial?

It’s not that hard to get a long list of symptoms for long covid. Just watch this thread as it grows, and you’ll easily find dozens. Things like this end up being a lint trap for people who just feel bad for whatever reason (which is all of us, at various points in our lives!) Nobody likes to be told that their symptoms are idiopathic.

Massaging this kind of data (clustering, etc.) is much lower value than finding fixed criteria that define a consistent group of patients who have objectively defined symptoms that cannot be more readily explained by another diagnosis. This is a pre-requisite for any further study. It can be done, but it’s hard, and it tends to lead to criticisms because you end up excluding a large number of people who fervently believe they have the illness, but don’t fit the objective standards.

Just for example: it’s not enough to claim that you have “brain fog”. A more valid endpoint might instead attempt to classify people based on standardized tests of thinking. Even that has problems, of course, but if you can just claim that you are fatigued and unable to think clearly, there’s a huge problem of confounding (i.e. maybe your symptoms are caused by something else), let alone the unverified nature of the original claim.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#56
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by water fasting? Do you avoid drinking water directly, or do you avoid all food? For example salads are basically sacks of water.

Water fast is when the only intake is water (plus electrolites and vitamines). Basically "eat nothing".

> Basically "eat nothing".

Thanks for this, reading "water fast" and "3 days" gave me a shot of adrenaline. The "water" prefix is just confusing, the word for abstaining from food is just "fast" for those interested.

If this is engagement bait, then well played..

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#57

[flagged]

These comments show me how amazing the world of covid disinformation still is. After every country/health authority in the entire world studying it for so long and all coming to the exact same conclusions there's still those who are positive they know better. Billions of people being studied for years vs I heard it from some dude on Twitter.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#58
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used to be able to order a paper version but here it is. https://web.expasy.org/pathways/

Thanks for the link! I looked over it, but I'm not seeing quantitative levels of reactions. That's been my biggest issue with current pathway databases. It's great to know what's connected to what, but very quickly it becomes everything connected to everything. And unfortunately everything doesn't reduce the problem space.

That would be difficult - a metabolic map is a diagram showing the known reactions. At any point in time, only a subset of these will be active. Like a road map - at midnight, only some roads will have traffic.

I think what you are looking for is more like a model of the metabolome, showing the flow through the network under certain conditions (steady-state, growth, cell stress, etc). Not sure if there is a readily available database of such models, or how easy it would be just to run them and get meaningful results.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#59
post #56
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water fast is when the only intake is water (plus electrolites and vitamines). Basically "eat nothing".

> Basically "eat nothing". Thanks for this, reading "water fast" and "3 days" gave me a shot of adrenaline. The "water" prefix is just confusing, the word for abstaining from food is just "fast" for those interested. If this is engagement bait, then well played..

It is a specific type of fasting. Saying only "fasting" can mean a lot of things, saying "water fast" means you only drink water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting

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