Researchers, doctors getting clearer view of long Covid

• Published date: 31 January 2022
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times (New Zealand)

LONG COVID largely remains a mystery, experts say, but a few clues are starting to emerge

With symptoms ranging from breathlessness to blood clots to lack of smell, what has been called long COVID might actually be a constellation of problems rather than one overarching condition.

Calling it one thing is like saying someone has ‘‘cancer’’ rather than specifying ‘‘pancreatic cancer’’ or ‘‘skin cancer’’, said Dr Nir Goldstein, a pulmonologist and director for The Centre for Post-COVID Care and Recovery at National Jewish Health in Denver.

The more precision experts could add to those diagnoses, the more likely they were to find treatments that would help people with unrelenting headaches, brain fog, trouble breathing and crippling exhaustion, he and others said.

Studies are not definitive but suggest that as many as one-third of people who had symptomatic COVID-19 — and even some who had no symptoms at all — may still suffer more than a month after their infection. A smaller number, but again, it is not clear how many, have symptoms that persist for months or even years.

The problem is global. People report similar symptoms around the world.

And there is no question those symptoms can be debilitating.

‘‘We have patients who were Olympians who struggle with basic activities of daily life. Patients who are academics and professors who forget what button to push on the washing machine to make it go,’’ Goldstein said.

The National Institutes of Health is recruiting thousands of Americans with long COVID into a $US470million ($NZ702.7million) research study so they can better categorise patients and eventually develop treatments for them.

Understanding long COVID was crucial for clinicians and scientists, said Dr Onur Boyman, an immunologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland.

‘‘This is going to be a major burden on us and on the people,’’ he said.

‘‘As long as we don’t understand, we will have difficulties finding appropriate treatments.’’

But answers will not come easily.

Many of the symptoms of long COVID, like fatigue, were common among people with a variety of different ailments and even in daily life, particularly over the last two difficult years, said Dr Michael Edelstein, an epidemiologist at Bar-Ilan University and research director at Ziv Medical Centre, both in northern Israel.

It was going to take time to even define exactly what long COVID was, he said.

This would be crucial for individual patients, for developing treatments, but also for insurance coverage and disability allowances, he said.

‘‘There’s going to be interests beyond the scientific community that are going to have an interest in figuring out exactly what constitutes long COVID.’’

Researchers would get there eventually, he said.

‘‘But it will take some time and it’s important to manage expectations.’’

Atleasttwotypesoflong COVID

At this point, two...