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Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

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Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#91

Post by notmyjob »

clanky wrote: post #48
notmyjob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the lipid nanoparticle based Covid prevention shots caused myocarditis in some younger males, so earlier incidence of cardiovascular complications vs. the present (when most people especially younger healthy males are choosing not to take updated boosters) would correlate with that as well.

The one Thai prospective study that I saw on this subject (the only one I ever found which measured biomarkers of heart damage like troponin before and after injection, which is utterly shameful), estimated a rate of heart damage in adolescent males in the range of 1-3%. So even that would be nowhere near enough to reach the 1/5 number.

I suspect many people commit the grave sin of mixing data sources to derive percentages, which seems almost impossible not to do in this case. I also strongly suspect that rates of infection (the denominator in question) were inflated to some extent during the pandemic as insurers and hmo were incentivized to detect covid even when it may not have been the primary reason for presenting. There were also disincentives or at least a lack of incentive to detect teratogenic effects of the lipid nanoparticle based preventative, and unfortunately likely personal biases as the preventative was highly politicized. But I’m not thinking about it much deeper than that, so you may be right.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#92

Post by dboreham »

Throwing out this random data point: I know several people who I believe have some sort of what could be called "long covid". Here's the weird thing though: all these people are some level of covid denier/vax skeptic type person. They themselves don't believe they have long covid (and in some cases don't even believe they had covid). But all of them conform to this pattern (as observed by me): 1. They had covid, 2. Immediately after they developed some weird long term symptoms that no doctor can explain.

Obviously there's some probability this is all coincidence but it does seem strange, especially considering the predisposition for these people to not think their issues were triggered by covid infection.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#93

Post by MontyCarloHall »

jancsika wrote: post #90
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t it be the other way round, that changes in health caused by other external factors erroneously get blamed on COVID? For instance, a disproportionate amount of long COVID cases are reported by women between the ages of 40 and 60, the exact age range when most women experience menopause [0]. Menopause can cause brain fog, fatigue, and other symptoms that mirror those of long COVID. Since pretty much everyone h…

> Couldn’t it be the other way round, that changes in health caused by other external factors erroneously get blamed on COVID? It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors. > Menopause can cause brain fog Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday: https://news.ycom…

>It is possible, but not to the degree that all long Covid cases are being confused with external factors.

Didn't mean to imply that all cases are, just that our definition of and knowledge about long COVID is nebulous enough that some nontrivial proportion of cases are likely attributable to external factors.

>Additionally, long Covid can cause brain fog. This was shown in brain scans from a popular HN post about a research paper just yesterday

Absolutely, just as other infections can cause severe lingering symptoms [0]. But we don't really know how prevalent these are, nor the severity of the prevalence. Studies like the one you link typically select for the most severe cases. We don't know whether it's useful to generalize from those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-acute_infection_syndrome

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#94

Post by resoluteteeth »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #35
resoluteteeth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the actual link I don't think they're saying that using it as a covid test with some specific threshold of microclots has a 94% accuracy but just that the raw microclot count has a 94% accuracy. The title on hn which implies that seems to be inaccurate and it's not the original title of the article.

No, that does not seem to be what they are saying. > We evaluated the diagnostic power of the device in a cohort of 45 LC patients and 14 healthy pediatric donors. We estimated a 94% accuracy for the microclot count using the devices, significantly higher than the traditional counting of microclots on slides (66% accuracy). They are comparing the predictive power and using accuracy (instead of sensitivity, recall, F1…

OK, I looked at the actual paper, and what 94% actually is is the 0.94 area under the curve for the receiver-operating characteristic curve (the plot of the true positive rate (TPR) against the false positive rate (FPR) at each threshold setting) not the accuracy for a specific binary result (e.g. at a specific arbitrary threshold).

See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155608641...

> In general, an AUC of 0.5 suggests no discrimination (i.e., ability to diagnose patients with and without the disease or condition based on the test), 0.7 to 0.8 is considered acceptable, 0.8 to 0.9 is considered excellent, and more than 0.9 is considered outstanding

So .94 is actually extremely good.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#95

Post by withinboredom »

colechristensen wrote: post #84
withinboredom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume we are built to lose some blood. I imagine throughout most of our species development, injuries were somewhat common on a regular basis. Just looking at the scars on my own body, from a quite active childhood and young adult period outdoors, I am extrapolating. n = 1

Before antibiotics, nontrivial wounds were often death sentences because of infection.

I never needed an antibiotic to live from these wounds. I’ve needed them from other things (almost died from strep) but not wounds.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#96

Post by pixl97 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #87
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #10

The paper claims that 1/5 of people experience Long COVID after an infection. Given that approximately everyone has caught COVID by now, this does not track with how rarely I've heard of people with it. Wikipedia lists much lower numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID (6–7% in adults, ~1% in children, less after vaccination.) and seems to use a more liberal definition than this paper, as it mentions "Mos…

> What's going on here? Perhaps its a reflection of how hard it is to get the medical community to take Long COVID seriously ? I would say there is more chance of them (sadly) telling you to go home, take a couple of paracetamol and get some rest. Or if you're lucky, they might mis-diagnose you with something else.... (No first-hand experience here, just going by one or two anecdotal stories I've heard on the grapevi…

>Perhaps its a reflection of how hard it is to get the medical community to take _____ seriously

There are a myriad of illnesses here that this seems to apply to.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#97

Post by ckosidows »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #56
jeremy151 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an area with PFAS contaminated ground water (which I now aggressively filter.) To me giving blood just kind of makes sense, if there is a class of things that can enter your blood and never leave, and does not replicate on its own, why not perform a regular "oil change" and hopefully help some people at the same time. Some study has been done: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/ The study spec…

“I’ll do something which might be beneficial or harmful to me (I don’t know) and if given evidence of harm (likely never) I’ll stop doing it.” Ok…have fun I guess.

The person you responded to didn't say anything about harm to themselves. They said there's nothing stopping them from donating even though they're aware of the PFAS contamination in their area.

And from what I understand, PFA contamination has no bearing on whether or not you can donate.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#98

Post by nradov »

bryant wrote: post #65
longcovidthrowa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't make a claim to the accuracy of the numbers, but I can offer an example of how long COVID can be undercounted. My daughter was a competitive long distance runner. Months after recovering from the acute symptoms of COVID, her performance numbers were still about 10% down and no amount of training would allow her to reach her previous level of performance. After many visits to doctors and specialists, she was e…

It's a pretty sad reflection of the times that there's a need to create a throwaway account to talk about long COVID symptoms, but this is a good personal anecdote to draw attention to what's likely happening. In my case, I only caught covid once - somepoint last year just before I would've gotten the updated booster. It took me well over a year to stop having acute pulmonary issues, and my lung performance is down y…

It ought to be possible to test that hypothesis by comparing publicly available race results for the same athletes on the same courses before and after the pandemic relative to the expected age-related performance loss. Anecdotally as an age-group endurance athlete I'm not seeing any big declines in myself and my friends so I'm highly skeptical that 20% were "ravaged". The actual incidence of significant loss of pulmonary function is probably much lower although I have no idea as to the actual number.

If anyone wants to quantify this then Athlinks is a good place to start for race results. Obviously the data is somewhat noisy, like you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.

https://www.athlinks.com/

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#99

Post by resoluteteeth »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #29
diffeomorphism wrote: post #4

94% accuracy sounds extremely bad, no? https://www.ssph-journal.org/journals/public-health-reviews/... > Prevalence estimated (...) 2%–3.5% in primarily non-hospitalized children. So a fake test always saying "No" would be more accurate at 96.5% accuracy.

Accuracy is a nonsense word in this context Tests have a sensitivity (1 - percentage of false negatives) and specificity (1 - percentage of false positives) "Accuracy" usually refers to sensitivity. If specificity is near 100% and the test is cheap/fast even low sensitivity can be good On the other hand you could have sensitivity of 100% but the test could be useless if specificity is low and the condition is rare

The paper explains what it actually means, so it's not nonsense. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558941 it's the area under the curve for the receiver-operating characteristic curve and 94% is extremely good.

Re: Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

#100

Post by j45 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #10

The paper claims that 1/5 of people experience Long COVID after an infection. Given that approximately everyone has caught COVID by now, this does not track with how rarely I've heard of people with it. Wikipedia lists much lower numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID (6–7% in adults, ~1% in children, less after vaccination.) and seems to use a more liberal definition than this paper, as it mentions "Mos…

With the math of reinfection, and percentages generally being lower than reality, long COVID is likely much more common and widespread in more people than not.
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