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

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 stupid. My heart goes out to the millions with this condition who aren't as privileged as I am. At least I have savings and family to fall back on (as well as a large cognitive reserve).

AMA, I guess!

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 covid is.

Fuck, I recently had Covid and I've been having trouble recalling things. Every other day or so I'll spend 5-10 seconds remembering the name of something. It's possible this happened before I got Covid, though... I don't remember!

I thought I was depressed, but recently realised that I’m actually feeling off because of long COVID symptoms. The brain fog is pretty much constant, and I’m definitely more forgetful and confused than I used to be. There are some cardiac symptoms as well, but those interfere less with my day to day. I’d love to find a way out of this state, but it seems that my doctor doesn’t keep up with the latest research, and doesn’t seem to think that long COVID symptoms are a thing…

It's quite possible that the causality goes the other direction, and a baseline population of brain disorders is being ascribed to the last notable thing that happened to them (which has also happened to ~ the entire population at this point).

ME/CFS is seriously underinvested. I don't really understand why, any drug that makes a noticeable difference here will be a guaranteed money printer. There are millions of people suffering total disability, many in developed countries that have well funded medical insurance. Compare that to depression (which it only superficially resembles): many SSRIs, SNRIs, multiple "schools" of psychotherapy, neuroleptics, lithium, ketamine, ECT, ...

I had strange symptoms post-Covid infection - my ability to recognize faces was very distorted and it seemed like everyone was familiar to me. It was like everyone I saw was an old high school acquaintance or maybe a celebrity, and I would get anxious because I didn't remember their name.

I thought this was already well known. A study in 2021 [1] found this relationship. However, it is good to keep people informed because it seems we are letting a potentially severely disrupting disease shred our society to bits.

From 2021: “Biological markers of brain injury, neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s correlate strongly with the presence of neurological symptoms in COVID-19 patients.”

[1] https://aaic.alz.org/releases_2021/covid-19-cognitive-impact...

I had Covid once - when people considered the pandemic mostly “over” (early this year). The worst was the brain fog which took weeks to clear up.

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

Alz is brain inflammatory response to viruses (among other foreing detritus) that got past the blood-brain barrier, so I'm not surprised.

Well the long term good might be novel treatments for one leading to improvements in treatment for the other. But this would be an extremely distressing outcome for any long covid sufferer to read about. I am not one.

How many people experiencing long COVID symptoms had one or more mRNA shots (lipid, adenovirus) and of those who experienced the worst of the symptoms and shots and boosters since 2021... how did the timing work out?

NO this is not a survey and it is not even an invitation to a flamewar. I would urge everyone to consider correlation themselves and privately and honestly, and consider the possibility.

In 2021 after years stable on his meds, my 83 year old Dad died 10 DAYS after his first Moderna, COVID negative. Pulmonary thrombosis. Ironically, an earlier vaxed friend who took on a bizarre errand to try to convince me that was likely a 'coincidence' and angered me so much I un-friended him, just died of 'heart complications'.

mRNA particles and spikes are too small. Lipid mRNA always escapes the injection site, even into unborn babies. There is delay before mRNA infected cells become active factories, and then a further delay before there are tiny spikes as well. Then finally depleted factories become scar tissue and clotting in the most sensitive regions of the body including the brain. None of these things are directly harmful by themselves. There's just too many, too quickly. I believe the phenomenon would be a delayed onset, whole body anaphylaxis reaction. If the heart or lungs are affected there is danger of mortality, as there was for Dad. But there could be long term effects too.

Another danger is corruption of medical science, when a particular "highly possible cause" goes without mention or further study, and existing studies make assumptions to tiptoe along a tightrope.

The first question I would have for researchers on long COVID topic today is, is it controlled for vaccination/booster status? And what are the results of the specific classes of patient?

Just think about it.

This isn't too big of a surprise when you look at the evidence that Alzheimer's, in general, is essentially a chronic viral disease of the brain. Ruth Itzhaki in particular has spent much of her career researching the connection (https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/ruth.itzhaki).

What makes this so difficult to surface is that the doctors who patients interact with are not really receptive to the idea that nuanced and difficult to diagnose symptoms may be caused by long COVID. They sort of just ignore that suggestion, don’t add anything to any database, etc. I think we are likely missing a lot of potential patterns in patient data because patients aren’t listened to and data isn’t collected.

For others confused by the references, ME CFS is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myalgic_encephalomyelitis/ch...

I've often said that I feel like I've lost at least a decade off my life. I had Covid back before tests, etc back in March 2020. Lots of testing until I lost my insurance. Recently, my GP says it's probably Long Covid, but we'll never prove it.

Beta blockers seem to have helped a little bit, at least my pulse doesn't just sit at 80 all the time. I find myself angry at getting so little done... until I do something... and then WHAM... that was a mistake.

Anyone here have any experience using Acetylcysteine to treat long covid? Or any other safe drug?

Is this more prevalent in remote workers? I've never felt duller than after switching to WFH and I suspect it's because I don't interact with the world (including other people) as much as before.

the amount of time i waste in hn grew immensely after the pandemic. is this long COVID?

Today’s generations just do not get a break.

Brain rot in the form of social media. Cognitive decline from possible long COVID. Constant exposure to microplastics from various sources (water contamination, water bottles, plastic wrapping, cars via tire breakdown).

This timeline fucking sucks.

UK meaning the University of Kentucky, not the United Kingdom.

My Covid "Toxo" hypothesis.

Hear me out.

Cat poop has something in it ("Toxo") that makes mice less afraid of cats. Win for cats.

I see so much scientifically-unsound* anti-vaxx hysteria from people who used to be otherwise quite intelligent and rational, that I suspect that Covid has done a number on them (like "Toxo" does a number on mice).

* IMHO, there can be rational hesitation to vaxx (Precautionary Principle, etc.) but I'm seeing "science-based mumbo jumbo".

The studies purporting to show evidence of long COVID, i.e. long term complications from COVID infections, are notoriously weak on rigor. Most make no attempt to control for the psychosocial impact of positive COVID diagnoses, like the isolation of quarantine, and the anxiety associated with being given a positive diagnosis for the infection.

The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...