Interest in Long COVID is declining & a new paper showing no CSF abnormalities in neuro Long COVID
Recently, a colleague mentioned to me that interest in long COVID was declining; I checked Google trends and indeed that appears correct.
I was also sent an interesting article on neurocognitive long COVID.
It is a very simple article. The authors take 37 patients with neuro long COVID— brain fog etc., and 22 healthy controls who never had COVID (in fact CSF was taken before COVID existed).
They compare many inflammatory markers in the blood and CSF. Guess what?
They are all totally the same. (some chance difference in both directions)
The authors conclude:
The authors paper confirms my impression— the null hypothesis— that to date, I have never seen any persuasive data that covid has any long term biological consequence beyond what one would expect getting equally sick from any respiratory virus. Yes, intubation is a long path to recover, and yes, you can have symptoms after a flu or covid for weeks, but, no, there is nothing special about COVID in this regard. It does not attack brains, etc.
I think that for many young adults, COVID was their first experience with a really bad viral illness. Many had never had chicken pox (they were vaccinated for that), and many had never even had a case of influenza that they can remember. As a middle-age person, I remember having chicken pox, 3 bouts with influenza, and another random 2-week long fever before my mid-twenties. When I had covid, it was like the worst case of influenza I could recall, and I was fully expecting 2-4 weeks until I felt 100% again, which was the case. I knew it was normal. I remember a lot of young adults being alarmed by this ("It's been two weeks and I still feel like crap! Something is wrong!")
Long COVID or post acute sequelae of COVID is what we have known for decades: post viral syndrome. The demographics are similar, the symptoms too.