Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain • Hacker News Board

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#101

Post by pjerem » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 12:57 PM UTC

sa-code wrote: post #85

EMM_386 wrote: post #77

I was affected by this "brain fog" after getting Covid, but I didn't put two and two together. I called my doctor's office to schedule an appointment and when the receptionist asked what the appointment was for, I simply said "brain fog". I had no other way to describe it. It was intense and disturbing. I often couldn't put cohererent thoughts together, I was constantly forgetting what I was doing, forgetting where I…

Not that this it's a good excuse, but it stressed doctors out when they are not able to diagnose something. So when all the tests and checks look good they are quick to dismiss the problems as psychosomatic as a way to cope with the stress of being unable to diagnose you. It's a dysregulation of the ANS/sympathetic nervous system which is likely caused by auto antibodies - so it's very much physiological and outside…

While you are right, there is a common misconception that psychosomatic means that the patient is making up its symptoms and that it’s in his mind. That’s not what a doctor means by psychosomatic, but rather than the symptoms are totally real but that they are originating from stress.

So, any good doctor will try to heal your symptoms regardless of the cause. The only difference when they think it’s psychosomatic is that they’ll also try to treat your stress.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#102

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:05 PM UTC

mentos wrote: post #53

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #20

I’ll share an abridged long COVID story about myself since it dearly affected me. Just so other people can kind of know what the experience was like. I got sick in October 2020 before vaccines were available. After the initial 10 days which I would describe as moderate, borderline severe (6/10, where 7/10 is hospital and 9/10 is ICU) I had all manner of absolutely weird things happen to my body. I won’t go into the d…

I too believe my long covid symptoms were an autoimmune issue. Read my HN post from 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26350951#26355878

Interesting that you reported leg/muscle pain, having a burning feeling in my leg was also one of the reasons I went to the ER that day thinking I had a blood clot.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#103

Post by fellerts » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #98

fellerts wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, happy to discuss. You have me stumped though, I actually can't articulate how I work. If what I'm doing requires extreme care, such as pushing configuration updates to production, I will mentally say out loud what I'm planning to do (probably something similar to [0]), but calling that voice is a conscious effort. Normally I'll follow a vague "feeling" of what needs to happen. I think my mind works directl…

Wait, you have no "inner voice" at all? I don't understand. Thought experiment: You go to a wall and there is a picture hanging on the wall. You like the picture. Can you "say" in your head without using your voice/mouth "I like this picture"? If you have to use your voice, can you mimic the tongue movement without moving your mouth and "hear" the words without making a sound?

I can conjure up a voice in my head and make it say anything I want, such as "I like this picture", but it's a contrived and unnatural thing for me to do. It takes effort and "takes over" my whole brain. If a picture on the wall catches my eye, I will just enjoy it. Maybe that's why I struggle to answer "oh, what do you like about this picture?", because nothing about my experience had any relation to words at all.

I normally don't talk very much, maybe that's why? Maybe my though process is further removed from language than that of most other people?

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#104

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

borkt wrote: post #54

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #20

I’ll share an abridged long COVID story about myself since it dearly affected me. Just so other people can kind of know what the experience was like. I got sick in October 2020 before vaccines were available. After the initial 10 days which I would describe as moderate, borderline severe (6/10, where 7/10 is hospital and 9/10 is ICU) I had all manner of absolutely weird things happen to my body. I won’t go into the d…

Precisely what happened to me. Doctor botched the disgnosis, my department in local government did everything in their power to push me out immediately upon sharing an honest assesment of how I was feeling, asserting that I was voluntarily resigning rather than genuinely ill - which came across as retaliation for some of them having to return to the office in my stead, as prior to catching covid-19 and suffering the…

I was not working at the time I got sick (for unrelated, voluntary reasons), and ended up having a 2 year gap, at which point when returning and interviewing I essentially told people during interviews that I was “taking care of a sick family member” during my gap period, implying that this was the primary purpose of my gap. I left out that the sick family member happened to be myself. All the responses I got were understanding and no one ever pressed further.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#105

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:27 PM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #51

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #20

I’ll share an abridged long COVID story about myself since it dearly affected me. Just so other people can kind of know what the experience was like. I got sick in October 2020 before vaccines were available. After the initial 10 days which I would describe as moderate, borderline severe (6/10, where 7/10 is hospital and 9/10 is ICU) I had all manner of absolutely weird things happen to my body. I won’t go into the d…

Would it be possible that something else caused it, leading you to also have a more severe episode of COVID? Perhaps you had a preexisting undiagnosed immune disorder, which expressed itself during the COVID episode?

Perhaps, there is a running theory that Covid activates latent Epstein-Barr Virus among other things. But as far as I know it’s just a glorified hypothesis with little scientific evidence to support it.

I wouldn’t even classify the actual covid episode I had as severe (and indeed, as far as I could tell from reading reports there doesn’t seem to be strong correlation between severity of illness and whether someone gets long covid or for how long). It was not bad enough to go to the hospital (though I did consider doing so a couple of times).

I don’t really get allergies or otherwise and consider myself to have a pretty normal immune system. I get sick at about the same rate as what you would expect a normal person to get sick. My health simply took a v shaped nosedive on a graph for 6 months after I got covid.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#106

Post by immibis » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:38 PM UTC

gadders wrote: post #93

npunt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the potential effect of a message is rather harmful, it's reasonable to hold the veracity of that message to a higher standard of scrutiny than if a message is benign. This wasn't a good study, scientifically. Scrutiny was not applied before reporting on it, and now we have a harm on our hands. The fact that we're discussing it attests to that, since its a sideshow leeching attention away from the main topic of lo…

Who decides on what is harmful vs what is benign?

This question can be be applied to almost anything and only serves to pointlessly redirect discussion ("sealioning") - "don't write code with bugs" "oh? Who decides what is a bug and what is intended behaviour?" - "don't take candy from babies" "who decides at which age you turn from a baby into a toddler?"

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#107

Post by immibis » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

algorias wrote: post #76

LastCovidWave wrote: post #32

Perhaps then we should stop ignoring the potential effects of the ongoing airborne pandemic. But no, keep f*king around with COVID, and we keep finding out.

There is no ongoing pandemic. There is now an en demic virus that's part of the regular rotation of pathogens that cause colds and flu, and covid doesn't seem particularly more dangerous than the rest (NB: influenza can be very nasty too! I'm not minimizing the harm of covid). The pandemic was a unique situation because the entire world population was immuno-naive to covid. This is no longer the case; we all get expo…

The difference between a pandemic and an endemic is that we don't want to stop an endemic. The virus is the same; the effects are the same but more averaged out with fewer peaks and troughs; they are just as bad.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#108

Post by jventura » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

fellerts wrote: post #89

jventura wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I am fascinated by people _not_ having inner monologues, as I do have a very active inner voice. For me having inner voice is like one part of me does the talking, the other does the listening. If other people could listen, they would probably say that I'm a crazy dude, doing all that talk. When I see people talking loud, I call them crazy, thank god I do not project my voice outwards! But sometimes, things come…

Of course, happy to discuss. You have me stumped though, I actually can't articulate how I work. If what I'm doing requires extreme care, such as pushing configuration updates to production, I will mentally say out loud what I'm planning to do (probably something similar to [0]), but calling that voice is a conscious effort. Normally I'll follow a vague "feeling" of what needs to happen. I think my mind works directl…

> If what I'm doing requires extreme care, such as pushing configuration updates to production, I will mentally say out loud what I'm planning to do (probably something similar to [0]), but calling that voice is a conscious effort.

Yes, mentally say out loud is what I'm talking about. And sometimes it's a conscious effort as well, definitely. But it doesn't require much effort from my part. Well, it requires so little effort, that sometimes I catch my mind talking to itself, without the other part really listening. So, sometimes it is not a conscious effort. My reasoning is that maybe some of the thoughts seem to trigger some part of the brain that is used for vocabulary, and they express themselves "vocally" (but without any sound)..

> Do you also subvocalize when reading text?

When reading text, and now by replying to you. English is not my native language, so I must "vocalize" the words internally, and then write them as they "sound" in my brain. I've been doing this for such a long time that is feels quite natural to me. And when I'm less rusty (specially when talking), I tend to skip the "inner" voice and project directly to the "outer" voice. But it only happens when I'm having lots of conversations in English. I haven't been writing or talking in EN too much lately, so I have to use my inner voice as intermediate step. As for reading, most of the time I read using my "inner" voice, both for English as for Portuguese (which is my native language).

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#109

Post by wahnfrieden » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 2:11 PM UTC

abrookewood wrote: post #10

Recently read an article suggesting that we should drop the term Long Covid, as it implies that there is something unique about it, when the research seems to show that the impairment post-Covid is very similar to that from Influenza: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/15/long-covid-s...

Are you saying that influenza also results in the findings of the article I posted, that the blood brain barrier breaks down? If not, then I don't know why you'd say it isn't distinct unless you're just commenting without reading. Your linked article does not address the OP article's findings.

Re: Long Covid brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

#110

Post by SammyStacks » Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 2:11 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #43

abrookewood wrote: post #10

Recently read an article suggesting that we should drop the term Long Covid, as it implies that there is something unique about it, when the research seems to show that the impairment post-Covid is very similar to that from Influenza: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/15/long-covid-s...

That might make a case for replacing the name but not eliminating it. Eliminating it would be akin to removing the name "stomach cancer" because other cells can also become cancerous. You need a name for things. And long flu might have different etiology than long covid despite similar symptoms, so it doesn't make sense to lump them together as "long virus".

I think replacing it is the way to go. It's important to differentiate between the acute symptoms of COVID and the chronic, persistent long-term symptoms, even if they both emanate from the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the body. It will be helpful for research, treatment, and the general understanding of physicians, mental health practitioners in the general public.

I think there's precedent for such a decision in how concussions are generally viewed. An individual can be diagnosed with a concussion, which has common, acute symptoms. If the acute symptoms last longer than is typical for a concussion of a given severity, the individual could be diagnosed with persistent post-concussive symptoms (a.k.a. post-concussion syndrome). Of course brain injuries are different than viral infections, and we still have a ton to learn about brain injuries, but it's the idea of clearly differentiating between the acute effects and the chronic, persistent long-term effects.

To be clear, I'm not trying to relate COVID with concussions beyond the medical nomenclature, but I think the nomenclature is effective in making the distinction to which I'm referring. It's not perfect, but we'll never have perfection in research.

Edit: It's unclear if the paragraph breaks are displaying properly, so I apologize if it appears as a wall of text.