How long will it take to understand long COVID?

COVID was contracted by Rachel Robles. The data analyst has been sick for a day and a half. Most doctors didn't believe her when she said that she had gone from running the Brooklyn Half Marathon the previous year to enduring unbearable fatigue. She didn't know how to put numbers together. She always felt like she wasn't getting enough air.

One doctor told her that covert doesn't last for 90 days. If you don't get over it, you will die.

The dichotomy of complete recovery or death has turned out to be a lie. There are between 8 million and 23 million Americans who are still sick after being exposed to a disease. An estimated 1 million people have been left disabled because of long COVID, and that number is likely to grow as the virus continues to evolve. After their second or third infections, some people who escaped long carbon are getting it again. Linda Geng, a physician and co-director of the long COVID clinic, says that it is a huge public health crisis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have recognized long COVID as a real phenomenon, but there are still many questions about what causes it and how to treat it. Long COVID can assume a variety of different forms. Akiko Iwasaki is an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine.

The coronaviruses could cause organ damage, cause blood clot, cause autoimmunity, hide out in tissues, and more. Several narratives could be happening at the same time in a patient, or one could set off another in an unhappy sequence of events that keeps the patient in bad health. By teasing apart the theories one by one, researchers are getting a better understanding of the illness and closer to therapies that don't just mask symptoms but eliminate the root cause.

Listening to patients

The experiences shared by patients have led to many of the earliest insights into long COVID. A survey by the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of long COVID patients who are doing research into their condition, compiled a list of more than 200 different symptoms. Some of the most common complaints include fatigue, cognitive impairment, shortness of breath, irregular menstrual periods, headaches, heart problems, and depression. The constellation of reported symptoms can change over time.

Because there is no agreed-upon definition of long COVID, no simple diagnostic test, and no way to distinguish one type from another, the various manifestations of this mysterious condition are lumped under one big umbrella. Several promising hypotheses are being provided the first evidence for.

There is a theory that blames the illness on organ or tissue injury caused by the initial infections with the viruses. The coronaviruses can enter the body through the respiratory tract, but can also enter through the bloodstream to cause infections in other parts of the body. It can cause waves of inflammation that can cause damage to multiple organs.

Researchers at the University of Oxford compared brain scans of people before and after they got COVID and found that even mild cases can cause the brain to shrink. Mental decline is equivalent to 1 to 10 years of aging because of the small amount of brain volume lost each year. It is too early to know if this effect is permanent or if it will cause age related disorders in the future.