It did occur to me in learning more about covid that there are a lot of unexplained autoimmune conditions (HELLP syndrome, Type 1 diabetes) that could be viral in nature.
Wouldn't that mean there would be a viral load indicator? In this case it seems to mimic it because we see the virus doing exactly that. To assume the diabetes is viral would require a virus.
> The latest clue comes from an experimental study in miniature lab-grown pancreases published last week suggests that the virus might trigger diabetes by damaging the cells that control blood sugar.
That seems like a better explanation - damaging the same elements in an a healthy body that match the same non-functioning elements of a diabetics. Two different causes lead to the same condition.
For sure but the virus isn't actually "doing" the damage. The presence of it starts an immune cascade that leads to the damage. So the trigger for T1 diabetes could still be a virus, not because of symptoms but as a result of an immune cascade. Framed that way, a lot of unexplained illness could indeed be friendly fire.
> The virus can also induce the production of proteins known as chemokines and cytokines, which can trigger an immune response that might also kill the cells, according to the study8 published in Cell Stem Cell on 19 June.
I wonder if there's anything we routinely give to people that might trigger a similar reaction that would explain the rising rates of type 1 diabetes worldwide?
The Shoenfeld/ASIA syndrome hypothesis is fairly new, quite controversial, and so far more or less unsupported by large scale science. It's worth discussing in reasoned environments.
Citing it like you do here amounts to an antivax conspiracy theory. Stop it.
It's a conspiracy theory to suggest that some vaccines or their components may contribute to the onset of auto immune diseases?
No, it's a hypothesis. What makes it a 'conspiracy theory' is that the CDC and other medical bodies are failing to do any conclusive studies on the use of adjuvants (and vaccines generally) and how they relate to autoimmune disorders.
From [1]
> Further research is encouraged into the direct associations between vaccines and autoimmune conditions, and the biological mechanisms behind them.
I guess this study is saying there's a reasonable hypothesis and further research should be done.
Predictably, any scrutiny of vaccine safety is met with calls of 'conspiracy theory.'
> What makes it a 'conspiracy theory' is that the CDC and other medical bodies are failing to do any conclusive studies on the use of adjuvants (and vaccines generally) and how they relate to autoimmune disorders.
There's that conspiracy theory again. Vaccines are definitively, unequivocally safe. So are adjuvants.
Juts so we're on the same page common adjuvants include aluminum hydroxide (which numerous studies since the 1970s have shown a lack of adverse effects) and paraffin oil (in use from 400BCE).
Vaccines generally are studied unbelievably closely, in no small part because of the unwarranted attention they've been receiving, wait for it, from conspiracy theorists. It's like aspartame.
You cited a study that showed no effect from adjuvants in vaccines in an unrelated discussion about covid and diabetes, in an attempt to start an argument where, at best, your position amounts to "we need more investigation". That's why you're being dismissed.
Studies always say we need more investigation and always have imperfections that could be improved upon.
It's about 1000000x easier to imagine a possible problem than to devise and carry out a series of experiments (or even simply analyze results) that genuinely assess whether the possible problem is, in fact, a problem.
You are doing the former. Scientific consensus reflects the latter.
Feel free to actually read what I linked, and then respond with reasons why their conclusions are invalid.
When we're talking about safety trials, there's all sorts of interesting ways to invalidate the results. Like, do the efficacy trials (trials showing the antibody response of a given vaccine) utilize the same batch, randomly selected, with the safety trials? What if adjuvants are 10 times higher or lower in one trial than the next? Are there maximum safe doses established for these ingredients? Are doses beyond the safe dose linked to any autoimmune conditions? What percentage of the maximum safe dose is typically present in a given vaccine? Were the adjuvants sourced or created via the same process in the same facility to the same specification in each of the trials? Are those same production facilities being utilized today? Is there any industry oversight into the conformity of vaccines matching their stated ingredients and no other contaminants?
These are all really hard questions. I don't believe the regulatory agencies are doing most of that. I believe it's an FAA/Boeing self-certify situation. You probably didn't hear about how HHS hasn't been performing the safety studies mandated by law.
We also know that previous vaccines that are no longer in use have been known to cause autoimmune disorders. It's not scientific fantasy.
Edit (Since I can't reply to child):
Nobody's talking about LD50. We're talking about how much of an ingredient is safe in a vaccine.
It's no stretch to conclude that if X amount of some substance causes an increase in an immune response, to say that Y amount would be harmful, up to and including inducing an autoimmune problem. Since we also know there is a causative relationship between vaccines and autoimmune disorders, then it's fair to investigate why.
Unfortunately, we're left here to speculate on the internet. No amount of criticism can be levied towards any vaccine or component of a vaccine, because the authorities haven't taken the initiate to actually study any of this information. Most people assume, naively that they have, but unfortunately, they haven't. When called out, like child comment, it's washed away with "Can't prove a negative." Right.
> Are there maximum safe doses established for these ingredients?
Yes, there are, like for every material. It's the LD50, and it's in the MSDS. For instance, Aluminum Hydroxide [1]. The LD50 is 2000mg/kg, so you'd have to practically eat your weight in it. Paraffin Oil is here [2], and the LD50 is 5000mg/kg.
Do you really think people are YOLO-ing adjuvants?
> Are doses beyond the safe dose linked to any autoimmune conditions?
You're asking people to prove a negative, which is why you're coming off the way you are. I suggest you find some reason why we should be looking for this, which you should be able to figure out by simply looking at immunized vs non-immunized populations and correlating with publicly available data on disease. Not sure where or if the US publishes this, but Canada has open access to all this on the Stats Canada website.
> What percentage of the maximum safe dose is typically present in a given vaccine?
Less than the LD50, naturally. Jokes aside, that's something you can easily find out.
> Unfortunately, we're left here to speculate on the internet.
If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions, the scientific progress of our civilization would stall. Case in point, this information is readily available to you yet you would rather speculate than get off you ass and hunt it down:
> I don't believe the regulatory agencies are doing most of that. I believe it's an FAA/Boeing self-certify situation.
Why, you might ask, don't I get off my ass and hunt it down for you? I could. I know where it lives. Through experience, I also know the look of a horse dead-set on not drinking, so why should I waste time leading you to water?
Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point, but if you did care to look, you're sure they'd turn up. How convenient for you to just know things exist without any evidence.
> If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions
Oh, sure, label people as 'crackpots' when they show you a study that supports their argument while providing none of your own.
My position is "These studies should exist, and don't" and your position is, what exactly?
> Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point
No, I do. Developing an informed opinion on this matter is about a thousand times harder than figuring out who is supposed to regulate this, how they are supposed to regulate it, and where their documents live. You can't even be bothered to do the latter, so I conclude that you have no genuine interest in the former.
In my experience, it takes 5 minutes to spin a crackpot theory and 5 hours to assemble, review, and summarize studies to craft a "bespoke" refutation. The moment I do, the crackpot spends another 5 minutes to spin another crackpot theory, and it takes another 5 hours to craft another bespoke refutation. See the problem?
That's why I don't do bespoke refutations anymore. I can't. Nobody can, at scale. Nobody gets paid to track down every ill-conceived half-idea posted to facebook or HN and carefully assemble a refutation. There might not be enough scientists in the world to do it even if people were willing to pay. Instead, we point to experts and scientific consensus. Are they fallible? Yes. Very. But they're a lot less fallible than crackpots.
A crackpot theory is a broken clock that's right twice a day. Scientific consensus is a shaky compass needle that usually points somewhere in the vicinity of North unless you shake it too hard.
So what you're saying is, that study I linked to was published by a bunch of crackpots, and there's actually no need to study the relationship between vaccines, their ingredients, and autoimmune disorders.
There's a lot of information available in that study I linked, you should check some of it. Careful, it might challenge your deeply held dogmatic beliefs, though.
You: "Look, I found a paper on google scholar that seems to support my opinion!"
PhD: "It 10 minutes I can find a 10 papers that seem to support your opinion and 10 more that seem to contradict it. 2/3 of everything published is meaningless due to methodology mistakes and 99% of what remains has extremely narrow scope and implicit context. At best the paper you have found is a small piece of a big puzzle. To understand the big puzzle I'll have to take a class, read a textbook, read 3 annualreviews (or w/e the equivalent is in immunology), and conduct a literature survey of about a hundred papers. Then I can call my opinion somewhat informed."
The authors of the paper you linked are not crackpots. Someone who thinks they can skip the long and arduous process of developing an informed opinion because they found a paper that says something is a crackpot.
I don't know that you're a crackpot, but I need to see strong evidence that you aren't a crackpot before engaging in scholarly discourse in order to avoid the 5 minute / 5 hour problem. One sufficient piece of evidence would be if we met in a scholarly context. HN is not a scholarly context. Another sufficient piece of evidence would be a demonstrated familiarity with research techniques. Your inability to find the most basic regulatory filings in this field does not bode well on that front. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but you haven't passed my filters for not being a crackpot, and that's why I'm unwilling to engage in scientific discussion with you.
None of what you're saying is relevant whatsoever. Since there are no studies to disprove the hypothesis, the hypothesis is valid.
We're also not talking about some fringe medical condition, we're talking about autoimmune disorders, which should, as you might imagine, be one of the first and primary things considered when injecting things into people that affect the immune system. I would call this a "Glaring Omission" and probably not one of chance. You can't tell me nobody thought about this and considered it a valid question.
You and I both know how controls for vaccines studies work in human populations. So if a condition is broadly related to vaccines or common ingredients (adjuvants), the control group very likely will have the same incidence as the test group.
Since we can't rely on human studies to show cause and effect, we need to rely on animal studies. Unfortunately, unless there is clinical presentation of symptoms during the very brief study period, any longer term effects are going to go unnoticed. Nobody is going looking for 'autoimmune disorders' in vaccine clinical trials. It stands to reason that at some point some test subject should have presented autoimmunity during the clinical trials just due to normal population incidence, but in all the studies I've read, I haven't come across that. I do know of one autoimmune disorder definitely linked with vaccination, and that's GBS. Of course, they never caught GBS during clinical trials, that was done retrospectively.
What I want to see is a study that definitely answers the question: "Under what conditions will this vaccine or any of it's components trigger an autoimmune condition." How many mg of Aluminum Hydroxide can I inject into a creature before it starts having any measurable long term or short term effects in any amount greater than the control. If it's 2x the amount in a single vaccine dose, well, we've got a serious problem then, don't we.
There are so many variables in the actual real world that aren't covered under clinical trials. Things like contraindications and proper handling and storage of vaccines are almost never adhered to in your standard office settings. There's not studies to indicate that proper administration procedures are being broadly followed (AMA wouldn't allow that, now would they?).
The fact of the matter is, you don't have the required studies to say with any level of certainty that any vaccine is free from inducing long-term chronic illness. Keep flaunting your credentials and trying to control the dialogue. The information is out there, we're going to keep asking these hard questions that you can't answer, and you're going to increasingly look like tools of the industry.
Please don't do flamewars and tedious tit-for-tats on HN. If a comment is egregious, flag it; otherwise, it's best to just let go, even if it means leaving something wrong on the internet.
> Most people who get vaccines have no serious problems. Vaccines, like any medicines, can cause side effects, but most are very rare and very mild. Some health problems that follow vaccinations are not caused by vaccines.
> In very rare cases, a vaccine can cause a serious problem, such as a severe allergic reaction.
Unequivocally safe and effective != risk free. Everything has risks, and yes, sometimes you need to compensate people. My house is safe, but I still have insurance.
This would be bad, but effect sizes are important. If it imposes a 1/1000 incremental odds of developing diabetes, that would be terrible, but not as bad as its 1/100 incremental odds of death.
If the deaths come to people who are elderly or otherwise close to death anyways and the diabetes comes to a bunch of otherwise healthy 18 year olds the impacts could be different than mere effect sizes would indicate. (Type 1 diabetes is like -10 years to life expectancy).
Apparently the flu might be able to cause type 1 diabetes too: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22456-diabetes-linked... (In general, it seems like other viruses have a lot of odd and rare effects that just don't get as much attention as anything involving Covid-19, giving the dubious impression that it's somehow different from other viruses in this regard.)
I am not a doctor but both my kids are T1D so I am quite familiar with it.
This part stood out to me;
> In most people with type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune cells start destroying β-cells — which are responsible for producing the hormone insulin — in the pancreas, often suddenly. In Gnadt’s case, Hollstein suspected that the virus had destroyed his β-cells, because his blood didn’t contain the types of immune cells that typically damage the pancreatic islets where the β-cells live.
If the virus damages the islets it could suppress insulin production, but without an autoimmune response there’s reason to be hopeful that the damage is only temporary and that the pancreas can recover.
TFA says that whether the virus directly attacks cells or induces an immune response, and whether the damage is permanent or not, are both areas under active investigation.
I will add that it's very common for what doctors believe to be "latent" T1D to be "triggered" by a viral episode.
The theory is that the body is somehow primed to have the auto-immune response, and that it is essentially inevitable, but it takes some unrelated stress/immune response to kick off the cascading failure.
In that regard it wouldn't be surprising to see the typical rate of T1D diagnosis just happening to be triggered by the currently predominant virus, i.e. COVID, but in that case you would expect to see the tell-tale antibodies, and the overall incidence rate of T1D in the population would not spike.
A lot of viruses trigger T1D, this thing is mostly getting a lot of press and researchers attention. It's also so contagious that we are getting unprecedented streams of data from symptomatic and asymptomatic patients.
SARS was worse with the consequences but less contagious.
So many caveats missing from this title and the article it feels like click bait. (It worked, I clicked).
Are there per-existing conditions?
What is the prevalence of this effect?
How long does this conditon last?
It can’t be that frequent if it took 6 months to find enough cases. It’s like the Kawasaki-like syndrom in kids with COVID-19. It happens, but what is the prevalence?
Just anecdata in the article and « we need more study »
This shit is scary. It’s bad enough tjat it’s contagious like flu and has a given mortality rate. But now some people are developing chronic conditions after it, like diabetes here. I also read about asthma or other lung conditions.
That shit is enough to make me stay at home forever. Then when I do go out I see people not being socially distant, no masks, etc. hope they don’t get this shit...
Those who suffer from the virus can also develop a host of other things. Look up how many people developed ME/CFS (Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) post SARS and how many are experiencing the same symptoms after "recovering" from COVID-19. Some are months into their recoveries with no signs of going back to their old normal.
I wish it was talked about more instead of people dismissing the fact that if a large percentage of those who get severe symptoms develop chronic illnesses, this is going to be a lot bigger than "just a flu". It far from just a flu. My significant other happens to be a SARS survivor who's been dealing with chronic illness since "recovering" from the infection in 2003. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I hope diabetes isn't yet another condition that many will develop after this.
CFS is nothing new when you're young and get serious viral infections.
When I got the right to vote, I also got EBV. I was stuck in bed for weeks with what the docs initially suspected to be leukemia. It tooks me months to get back to some kind of normal.
Even now I don't think I'm fully back to normal. I get tired much more easily.
I had a similar experience with EBV. Although I also think it caused a sleeping disorder as well (Delayed Sleep Phase). Any doctor I've mentioned this to has shrugged it off, I guess there's not much you can do even if they could establish that it was actually the cause.
This is scary. I also have DSP since then, but no one ever suggested the 2 could be linked.
Now I wonder how much data we are missing, as doctors also shrugged off my much worse baseline state, saying EBV was innocuous. But as I did a lot of sports, I know very well how it affected me. Another person on this post mentioned of their weightlifiting suffered.
We should get organized to find anything that may help us go back to normal and healthy.
Interesting, I think there's more to this than people know, but most doctors I've spoken to don't even know about DSP let alone the seemingly obscure idea that it could be caused by EBV. It's hard, because I really think some amount of validation would be really beneficial to people who suffer from these problems. People have made some pretty insensitive comments about my sleep. Am I just lazy? Is it all in my head? Am I broken? It has an effect over time. I've heard doctors state that CFS doesn't even exist, or that EBV doesn't cause long lasting issues with sleep or fatigue, yet I hear so much about it. For me, the abnormal sleeping schedule isn't really a problem itself but rather it's the social expectations and obligations people and work has that you sleep to their schedule, what they consider normal.
There has to be more research conducted for this (and sleep disorders in general, really) because if there is a link that's the only way forward to managing it through your healthcare provider. At the moment I haven't found many doctors willing to be so speculative which makes sense - they don't know what to test for or how to treat it; so there's nothing they could really do anyway.
Personally I have found modafinil[1] to be extremely helpful in combating sleep and fatigue, one of it's on label uses is for people with narcolepsy so it's possible your doctor might be willing to prescribe it for you off-label. I buy it off the internet which is technically illegal where I live but it's way cheaper.
After your comment I did a really quick search for any information and found this paper[2] from 2018. It has some pretty big limitations, but I think it's worth doing more research.
This is identical to my partners experience. She got EBV (asymptomatically, only discovered in blood records years after) and has suffered from CFS and Delayed Sleep Phase disorder for almost a decade now. She's recently been prescribed Dexamethasone, which has helped manage her symptoms somewhat.
Thanks for the info mbo, I'll look into Dexamethasone. I currently use Modafinil to help manage my excessive sleepiness and it's been really helpful. Doesn't 'fix' it, but definitely helps.
People have already started appearing in various chronic illness forums around the world with what sounds very much like ME/CFS after having caught Sars2. The official diagnosis takes at least 6 months of having the symptoms and its notoriously badly diagnosed throughout the world due to the incredibly flawed PACE study that painted it as a physchological disease.
Doctors need to be quickly educated on the known blood bio marker combination (igG, lymocytes 2% and antibody complexes all abnormal) until the Stanford nano needle salt stress test is developed and released. They need to ensure patients are put onto a pacing regime which will slow the rate at which they get worse.
Many epidemics have caused ME/CFS "outbreaks" and it has no treatment and almost no research has even been done. 5% of people recover but some also die, most are broken for life. Doctors often think its diabetes as it presents with similar systemic issues but the insulin tests usually come up fine. Its critical they do immune system and full thyroid tests and get the diagnosis and the treatment correct early as each over exertion will permenantly degrade their patients energy levels.
Only upside to this is the amount of noise being generated and new funding being allocated to increase research and find a cure or treatment. Hopefully new testing can be developed, doctors can be educated so they can treat patients instead of doubting them or saying its all in their heads, governments can acknowledge people who are affected and actually support them instead of letting them wither away, out of sight, out of mind.
Can the asymptomatic who never present symptoms, or those whose symptoms don't land them in a testing facility / hospital, also develop these chronic illnesses? Is that known?
About 80% of ME/CFS patients know the day they caught the virus that caused their ME/CFS, but the other 20% don't. Whether that is because 20% of sufferers have a completely different trigger circumstance or because they were asymptomatic is unknown, like I said there has been almost no research in 70 years since the first outbreak was classed as mass hysteria and its been ignored and patients abused ever since until the last 2 years when research finally started to trickle in and get funded.
> Can the asymptomatic who never present symptoms, or whose symptoms don't land them in a testing facility / hospital, also develop chronic illnesses? Is that known?
The people who want to dismiss covid as 'just a flu' are not the kind of people who willingly research and consider details before making up their minds. I have never seen an argument by these people that takes into account the long term effects of a covid survivor. Frankly, at this point, these people are just idiots. There is so much evidence, one has to be willfully ignorant and in bad faith to make such arguments.
Is anyone tracking the number of people who experience these "other things"? Every tracker I've seen focuses on the number of cases, the number of new cases, and the number of deaths. Seems like we won't have a very good idea of the real damage being done until we also track the number of people that survive but have new disabilities. If that number is significantly large then the coronavirus is more dangerous than anyone is admitting.
In general we have to look much closer at viruses causing chronic illnesses or autoimmune disorders.
Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) is another one where lots of ailments seem to follow - I speak from personal experience combined with many reports both online and acquiantances.
Ever since having mono/kissing disease/EBV my body hasn't been remotely the same.
I have had the same experience. I accidentally drank another person's water bottle at the gym after a set, a few weeks later I had Mono. I have never had the same energy level that I used to have. I used to love working out and had so much energy, that is all gone.
I got EBV at university nearly 20 years ago. It laid me on my back for 3 weeks and I was ill for a month or two. I was delirious for so long that I think I actually flipped over into psychotic at one point! I'm bipolar type 2 and have always struggled with intermittent energy levels. Although it took until I was 38 to get a diagnosis and be put on meds that actually work. If only I had had the courage and self belief at 18yo to tell the doctor that the SSRIs made me high for the first 2 weeks and then made me worse. Sigh. Anyway back to EBV. I think it took me years to get back to 'normal'. And to some small extent I think I have less energy than I used to. But it's nothing life limiting and it's mild enough to be psychogenic.
There seems to be a growing movement to have two different public facing names as, more and more, people are having trouble parsing out the difference in the written and spoken media, which often just uses the singular term, "diabetes".
Is full of people with long duration recovery periods.
Caveats are that only people with long duration symptoms would find that place and post there. Also, it could just be something else that the person is blaming on their Covid diagnosis.
Given the volume of posts on long term recoveries, it seems likely that there's more impact than a normal get-sick-for-3-days flu.
I really wonder what the long term economic impact of a chronically fatigued population will be. It's clear by now that a) the virus isn't going away, and b) a lot of, if not most, people will get it.
If a substantial portion of the infected also develop a host of long term health issues, what's going to be the economic cost?
We seem to have been focusing on deaths as a key metric which has made a lot of younger people complacent. Apart from anecdotal accounts, I have seen very little reporting on the long term health effects among survivors
There's just no way to really measure long term health effects at this point, because the vast majority of infectees aren't past the normal timeline for full recovery from a serious disease. (Fatigue reports in particular probably shouldn't be concerning, since post-pneumonia fatigue is known to continue for 3-6 months.)
That's what has been so confusing for me to sort out. COVID seems, according to what I can see, to have an extra-long recovery period for many people.
I had walking pneumonia and bronchitis two years ago, and even with treatment it took a good 5 months to get out from under that in anything near 90% capacity.
Is COVID that? Or is it worse? This gives me more anxiety than the deaths, to be honest.
There is as yet insufficient information on exactly what covid19 does to our biology, and consequently there is a lot of guesswork and misinformation flying around. Researchers are in hair-on-fire triage mode, there's an enormous amount of pressure to just "figure it out", people keep forgetting that the first word for this infection's official name is "novel", and they keep likening it to things that they do understand even though it's not really any of those things.
So we don't know. Nobody does right now. It takes time. It is really unfortunate that it keeps getting compared to other diseases. It's a lot like encountering malaria for the first time and saying "it's basically yellow fever". We should be behaving as though there's a mysterious new illness sweeping through populations across the world, with unknown short-term and long-term effects, because that's exactly what's happening.
The earliest severe cases all presented as pneumonia, so this disease got treated that way. But, it was quickly discovered that the pneumonia didn't behave quite like normal cases of pneumonia, and then shortly after that, there turned out to be a strong correlation with cardiac and stroke events. So, although people still think of this as a respiratory disease, there is something else going on, we just don't know what yet.
I'm not in a vulnerable age group, but it's the constant stream of stories of patients experiencing everything from seizures and strokes to chronic fatigue and even diabetes that has me on edge. I don't want to get it and end up wrecking the next 12 months (or maybe more) of my life.
It's possible that SARS-CoV-2 isn't unique in that regard. We don't know whether other viruses might also cause the same damage because we haven't really looked. We know some of the risk factors for diabetes such as obesity, but patients with similar known risk factors have different outcomes. Maybe other viral infections are a missing factor?
The strange thing about SARS-CoV-2 is that viral load varies in human tissue. You could have small concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in cardiomyocytes, for instance.
I've never read of any type of coronavirus causing myocarditis and heart failure in patients. Also have never read of coronavirus being present in other locations of the body, other than nasal/sinus area and lungs.
> Various viruses, including the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), have been linked with autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes.
Btw, obesity is NOT a risk factor for type 1 diabetes.
Serious question: is it possible that part of the increased mortality for (type 2) diabetics is a result of high blood sugars caused by this kind of effect?
T1 diabetes is a strange disease, my brother has it and he was not remotely over-weight although in college and after, his diet was terrible(he also was extremely vitamin D deficient from avoiding the sun). He developed it in his late 20's. Another friend has it and he got it as a kid, he said it came on after a very bad bout of pneumonia he had beforehand, and his Dr's think that is what may have triggered it but who can say. Perhaps either a extremely hard illness or a vitamin deficiency can bring it on, covid-19 seems to fit the bill with accounts of people with low vitamin D levels getting more severe cases, and the fact that it attacks the entire body looking for weaknesses.
"Obesity, once rare in type 1 diabetes (T1D), is now an increasingly frequent problem (3–5). Accumulating evidence on the prevalence and consequences of obesity in T1D shows very clearly that this comorbidity is both underappreciated and poorly understood." .... " The considerable obesity burden in youth with T1D was confirmed, also in the T1DX, where the prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥95th percentile) was 13.5% in adolescents (mean age 15.4 years), with higher prevalences in those of black/African American descent (17.9%) and Hispanic/Latino descent (15.9%) between the years of 2010 and 2012."
My suspicion from diabetic research I did both prior and during my wife’s gestational diabetes, is that the increase in obesity that may have occurred in the last 60 years is due to bad dieting advice for T1 diabetics.
The fundamental health issue with diabetes is managing blood glucose levels. This is best done with low carb meals with slow carbs along with small amounts of periodic insulin. But for some reason common advice for diabetics is to eat large amounts of fast carbs and then take large doses of insulin. This combination is just begging for added weight (and increased risk of insulin sensitivity to boot).
I’m in the US, and all of the advice I’ve recovered from every doctor and nutritionist is to limit carbohydrates. You can “cover” as you put it, and you’re trained to be able to do that when the situation arises, but the baseline diet that I was given is certainly low carb by comparison to typical diet recommendations (not ketogenic, but far from “eat whatever you want”).
While I’m sure there are plenty of nurses and doctors out there giving rushed and questionable advice, I’d be surprised to find that this advice is “common” (though many patients may “hear what they want” so to speak).
Author is a professor of biochemstry, who is quite well known as a good scientist (but it's likely much of his name recognition comes from sharing a similar sounding name to a more famous person ....)
While the general response to COVID-19 is already infuriating for so many reasons, it’s especially frustrating to see people think it’s “OK” to get it since they’ll probably “recover”.
It needs to be drilled into people of all ages that “recovery” is terrible terminology. Congratulations, maybe you didn’t die but you still may very well develop lifelong conditions that really screw up your body and your lifestyle (and, if that’s not enough, consider the healthcare costs).
Furthermore, if a person’s only complaint about pandemic rules is their “inconvenience”, it’s time to grow up. No one owes you convenience, and this is definitely the point in your life to figure out how to do what’s better for society. Put on a mask. Follow the rules. And learn more about this, from actual health professionals, not politicians with mile-long track records of lying.
If you live alone, "follow the rules" means "do not come within six feet of another human being any time in the next several years." That is a heavier psychological burden than most people will ever carry in their lives. It doesn't serve anyone to trivialize it.
I think it's more likely that people already on the verge of "triggering" diabetes are simply more likely to catch coronavirus due to their general poor health and therefore weakened immune systems. Or at least they're more likely to be symptomatic.
Mounting clues suggest the entire field of medicine has no clue whatsoever. You can't trust anything without waiting for 2-3 months to see if there's a retraction, and maybe not even then. I will start paying attention when they figure out, once and for all, whether eggs and butter are good or bad for me.
suggest? why not prove coronavirus is dangerous for people with a functional immune system? lock 1 person with corona with a few healthy people, wait 2 weeks and see what happens.
Medical study: 455 persons exposed to a person with Covid19, non of the 455 persons became sick by the virus.
Conclusion: very low infectivity
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32405162/
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadWouldn't that mean there would be a viral load indicator? In this case it seems to mimic it because we see the virus doing exactly that. To assume the diabetes is viral would require a virus.
> The latest clue comes from an experimental study in miniature lab-grown pancreases published last week suggests that the virus might trigger diabetes by damaging the cells that control blood sugar.
That seems like a better explanation - damaging the same elements in an a healthy body that match the same non-functioning elements of a diabetics. Two different causes lead to the same condition.
I wonder if there's anything we routinely give to people that might trigger a similar reaction that would explain the rising rates of type 1 diabetes worldwide?
Probably nothing. These autoimmune conditions obviously can't be caused by things that intentionally trigger increased immune responses. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/adjuvants.html
Citing it like you do here amounts to an antivax conspiracy theory. Stop it.
No, it's a hypothesis. What makes it a 'conspiracy theory' is that the CDC and other medical bodies are failing to do any conclusive studies on the use of adjuvants (and vaccines generally) and how they relate to autoimmune disorders.
From [1]
> Further research is encouraged into the direct associations between vaccines and autoimmune conditions, and the biological mechanisms behind them.
I guess this study is saying there's a reasonable hypothesis and further research should be done.
Predictably, any scrutiny of vaccine safety is met with calls of 'conspiracy theory.'
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607155/
There's that conspiracy theory again. Vaccines are definitively, unequivocally safe. So are adjuvants.
Juts so we're on the same page common adjuvants include aluminum hydroxide (which numerous studies since the 1970s have shown a lack of adverse effects) and paraffin oil (in use from 400BCE).
Vaccines generally are studied unbelievably closely, in no small part because of the unwarranted attention they've been receiving, wait for it, from conspiracy theorists. It's like aspartame.
So weird that I cite a study that says we need more investigation, and you just dismiss me like a crackpot based on no evidence whatsoever.
It's about 1000000x easier to imagine a possible problem than to devise and carry out a series of experiments (or even simply analyze results) that genuinely assess whether the possible problem is, in fact, a problem.
You are doing the former. Scientific consensus reflects the latter.
When we're talking about safety trials, there's all sorts of interesting ways to invalidate the results. Like, do the efficacy trials (trials showing the antibody response of a given vaccine) utilize the same batch, randomly selected, with the safety trials? What if adjuvants are 10 times higher or lower in one trial than the next? Are there maximum safe doses established for these ingredients? Are doses beyond the safe dose linked to any autoimmune conditions? What percentage of the maximum safe dose is typically present in a given vaccine? Were the adjuvants sourced or created via the same process in the same facility to the same specification in each of the trials? Are those same production facilities being utilized today? Is there any industry oversight into the conformity of vaccines matching their stated ingredients and no other contaminants?
These are all really hard questions. I don't believe the regulatory agencies are doing most of that. I believe it's an FAA/Boeing self-certify situation. You probably didn't hear about how HHS hasn't been performing the safety studies mandated by law.
We also know that previous vaccines that are no longer in use have been known to cause autoimmune disorders. It's not scientific fantasy.
Edit (Since I can't reply to child):
Nobody's talking about LD50. We're talking about how much of an ingredient is safe in a vaccine.
It's no stretch to conclude that if X amount of some substance causes an increase in an immune response, to say that Y amount would be harmful, up to and including inducing an autoimmune problem. Since we also know there is a causative relationship between vaccines and autoimmune disorders, then it's fair to investigate why.
Unfortunately, we're left here to speculate on the internet. No amount of criticism can be levied towards any vaccine or component of a vaccine, because the authorities haven't taken the initiate to actually study any of this information. Most people assume, naively that they have, but unfortunately, they haven't. When called out, like child comment, it's washed away with "Can't prove a negative." Right.
> Are there maximum safe doses established for these ingredients?
Yes, there are, like for every material. It's the LD50, and it's in the MSDS. For instance, Aluminum Hydroxide [1]. The LD50 is 2000mg/kg, so you'd have to practically eat your weight in it. Paraffin Oil is here [2], and the LD50 is 5000mg/kg.
Do you really think people are YOLO-ing adjuvants?
> Are doses beyond the safe dose linked to any autoimmune conditions?
You're asking people to prove a negative, which is why you're coming off the way you are. I suggest you find some reason why we should be looking for this, which you should be able to figure out by simply looking at immunized vs non-immunized populations and correlating with publicly available data on disease. Not sure where or if the US publishes this, but Canada has open access to all this on the Stats Canada website.
> What percentage of the maximum safe dose is typically present in a given vaccine?
Less than the LD50, naturally. Jokes aside, that's something you can easily find out.
[1] https://beta-static.fishersci.com/content/dam/fishersci/en_U...
[2] https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC124020010&...
If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions, the scientific progress of our civilization would stall. Case in point, this information is readily available to you yet you would rather speculate than get off you ass and hunt it down:
> I don't believe the regulatory agencies are doing most of that. I believe it's an FAA/Boeing self-certify situation.
Why, you might ask, don't I get off my ass and hunt it down for you? I could. I know where it lives. Through experience, I also know the look of a horse dead-set on not drinking, so why should I waste time leading you to water?
> If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions
Oh, sure, label people as 'crackpots' when they show you a study that supports their argument while providing none of your own.
My position is "These studies should exist, and don't" and your position is, what exactly?
No, I do. Developing an informed opinion on this matter is about a thousand times harder than figuring out who is supposed to regulate this, how they are supposed to regulate it, and where their documents live. You can't even be bothered to do the latter, so I conclude that you have no genuine interest in the former.
In my experience, it takes 5 minutes to spin a crackpot theory and 5 hours to assemble, review, and summarize studies to craft a "bespoke" refutation. The moment I do, the crackpot spends another 5 minutes to spin another crackpot theory, and it takes another 5 hours to craft another bespoke refutation. See the problem?
That's why I don't do bespoke refutations anymore. I can't. Nobody can, at scale. Nobody gets paid to track down every ill-conceived half-idea posted to facebook or HN and carefully assemble a refutation. There might not be enough scientists in the world to do it even if people were willing to pay. Instead, we point to experts and scientific consensus. Are they fallible? Yes. Very. But they're a lot less fallible than crackpots.
A crackpot theory is a broken clock that's right twice a day. Scientific consensus is a shaky compass needle that usually points somewhere in the vicinity of North unless you shake it too hard.
There's a lot of information available in that study I linked, you should check some of it. Careful, it might challenge your deeply held dogmatic beliefs, though.
PhD: "It 10 minutes I can find a 10 papers that seem to support your opinion and 10 more that seem to contradict it. 2/3 of everything published is meaningless due to methodology mistakes and 99% of what remains has extremely narrow scope and implicit context. At best the paper you have found is a small piece of a big puzzle. To understand the big puzzle I'll have to take a class, read a textbook, read 3 annualreviews (or w/e the equivalent is in immunology), and conduct a literature survey of about a hundred papers. Then I can call my opinion somewhat informed."
The authors of the paper you linked are not crackpots. Someone who thinks they can skip the long and arduous process of developing an informed opinion because they found a paper that says something is a crackpot.
I don't know that you're a crackpot, but I need to see strong evidence that you aren't a crackpot before engaging in scholarly discourse in order to avoid the 5 minute / 5 hour problem. One sufficient piece of evidence would be if we met in a scholarly context. HN is not a scholarly context. Another sufficient piece of evidence would be a demonstrated familiarity with research techniques. Your inability to find the most basic regulatory filings in this field does not bode well on that front. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but you haven't passed my filters for not being a crackpot, and that's why I'm unwilling to engage in scientific discussion with you.
We're also not talking about some fringe medical condition, we're talking about autoimmune disorders, which should, as you might imagine, be one of the first and primary things considered when injecting things into people that affect the immune system. I would call this a "Glaring Omission" and probably not one of chance. You can't tell me nobody thought about this and considered it a valid question.
You and I both know how controls for vaccines studies work in human populations. So if a condition is broadly related to vaccines or common ingredients (adjuvants), the control group very likely will have the same incidence as the test group.
Since we can't rely on human studies to show cause and effect, we need to rely on animal studies. Unfortunately, unless there is clinical presentation of symptoms during the very brief study period, any longer term effects are going to go unnoticed. Nobody is going looking for 'autoimmune disorders' in vaccine clinical trials. It stands to reason that at some point some test subject should have presented autoimmunity during the clinical trials just due to normal population incidence, but in all the studies I've read, I haven't come across that. I do know of one autoimmune disorder definitely linked with vaccination, and that's GBS. Of course, they never caught GBS during clinical trials, that was done retrospectively.
What I want to see is a study that definitely answers the question: "Under what conditions will this vaccine or any of it's components trigger an autoimmune condition." How many mg of Aluminum Hydroxide can I inject into a creature before it starts having any measurable long term or short term effects in any amount greater than the control. If it's 2x the amount in a single vaccine dose, well, we've got a serious problem then, don't we.
There are so many variables in the actual real world that aren't covered under clinical trials. Things like contraindications and proper handling and storage of vaccines are almost never adhered to in your standard office settings. There's not studies to indicate that proper administration procedures are being broadly followed (AMA wouldn't allow that, now would they?).
The fact of the matter is, you don't have the required studies to say with any level of certainty that any vaccine is free from inducing long-term chronic illness. Keep flaunting your credentials and trying to control the dialogue. The information is out there, we're going to keep asking these hard questions that you can't answer, and you're going to increasingly look like tools of the industry.
You have that totally backwards. Everything is invalid until proven valid, not the other way around.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Then why does this exist:
https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
> Vaccines save lives by preventing disease.
> Most people who get vaccines have no serious problems. Vaccines, like any medicines, can cause side effects, but most are very rare and very mild. Some health problems that follow vaccinations are not caused by vaccines.
> In very rare cases, a vaccine can cause a serious problem, such as a severe allergic reaction.
Unequivocally safe and effective != risk free. Everything has risks, and yes, sometimes you need to compensate people. My house is safe, but I still have insurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune/inflammatory_syndro...
They tested negative for covid but this makes me wonder.
This part stood out to me;
> In most people with type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune cells start destroying β-cells — which are responsible for producing the hormone insulin — in the pancreas, often suddenly. In Gnadt’s case, Hollstein suspected that the virus had destroyed his β-cells, because his blood didn’t contain the types of immune cells that typically damage the pancreatic islets where the β-cells live.
If the virus damages the islets it could suppress insulin production, but without an autoimmune response there’s reason to be hopeful that the damage is only temporary and that the pancreas can recover.
TFA says that whether the virus directly attacks cells or induces an immune response, and whether the damage is permanent or not, are both areas under active investigation.
The theory is that the body is somehow primed to have the auto-immune response, and that it is essentially inevitable, but it takes some unrelated stress/immune response to kick off the cascading failure.
In that regard it wouldn't be surprising to see the typical rate of T1D diagnosis just happening to be triggered by the currently predominant virus, i.e. COVID, but in that case you would expect to see the tell-tale antibodies, and the overall incidence rate of T1D in the population would not spike.
SARS was worse with the consequences but less contagious.
How long does this conditon last?
It can’t be that frequent if it took 6 months to find enough cases. It’s like the Kawasaki-like syndrom in kids with COVID-19. It happens, but what is the prevalence?
Just anecdata in the article and « we need more study »
That shit is enough to make me stay at home forever. Then when I do go out I see people not being socially distant, no masks, etc. hope they don’t get this shit...
I wish it was talked about more instead of people dismissing the fact that if a large percentage of those who get severe symptoms develop chronic illnesses, this is going to be a lot bigger than "just a flu". It far from just a flu. My significant other happens to be a SARS survivor who's been dealing with chronic illness since "recovering" from the infection in 2003. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
I hope diabetes isn't yet another condition that many will develop after this.
ME = Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
CFE = Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
When I got the right to vote, I also got EBV. I was stuck in bed for weeks with what the docs initially suspected to be leukemia. It tooks me months to get back to some kind of normal.
Even now I don't think I'm fully back to normal. I get tired much more easily.
Now I wonder how much data we are missing, as doctors also shrugged off my much worse baseline state, saying EBV was innocuous. But as I did a lot of sports, I know very well how it affected me. Another person on this post mentioned of their weightlifiting suffered.
We should get organized to find anything that may help us go back to normal and healthy.
There has to be more research conducted for this (and sleep disorders in general, really) because if there is a link that's the only way forward to managing it through your healthcare provider. At the moment I haven't found many doctors willing to be so speculative which makes sense - they don't know what to test for or how to treat it; so there's nothing they could really do anyway.
Personally I have found modafinil[1] to be extremely helpful in combating sleep and fatigue, one of it's on label uses is for people with narcolepsy so it's possible your doctor might be willing to prescribe it for you off-label. I buy it off the internet which is technically illegal where I live but it's way cheaper.
After your comment I did a really quick search for any information and found this paper[2] from 2018. It has some pretty big limitations, but I think it's worth doing more research.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220045/
Doctors need to be quickly educated on the known blood bio marker combination (igG, lymocytes 2% and antibody complexes all abnormal) until the Stanford nano needle salt stress test is developed and released. They need to ensure patients are put onto a pacing regime which will slow the rate at which they get worse.
Many epidemics have caused ME/CFS "outbreaks" and it has no treatment and almost no research has even been done. 5% of people recover but some also die, most are broken for life. Doctors often think its diabetes as it presents with similar systemic issues but the insulin tests usually come up fine. Its critical they do immune system and full thyroid tests and get the diagnosis and the treatment correct early as each over exertion will permenantly degrade their patients energy levels.
The evidence so far is "yes", unfortunately.
Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) is another one where lots of ailments seem to follow - I speak from personal experience combined with many reports both online and acquiantances.
Ever since having mono/kissing disease/EBV my body hasn't been remotely the same.
How could you possibly tease out that covid triggered diabetes in me when I am doing such a good job myself?
Is full of people with long duration recovery periods.
Caveats are that only people with long duration symptoms would find that place and post there. Also, it could just be something else that the person is blaming on their Covid diagnosis.
Given the volume of posts on long term recoveries, it seems likely that there's more impact than a normal get-sick-for-3-days flu.
If a substantial portion of the infected also develop a host of long term health issues, what's going to be the economic cost?
We seem to have been focusing on deaths as a key metric which has made a lot of younger people complacent. Apart from anecdotal accounts, I have seen very little reporting on the long term health effects among survivors
I had walking pneumonia and bronchitis two years ago, and even with treatment it took a good 5 months to get out from under that in anything near 90% capacity.
Is COVID that? Or is it worse? This gives me more anxiety than the deaths, to be honest.
So we don't know. Nobody does right now. It takes time. It is really unfortunate that it keeps getting compared to other diseases. It's a lot like encountering malaria for the first time and saying "it's basically yellow fever". We should be behaving as though there's a mysterious new illness sweeping through populations across the world, with unknown short-term and long-term effects, because that's exactly what's happening.
The earliest severe cases all presented as pneumonia, so this disease got treated that way. But, it was quickly discovered that the pneumonia didn't behave quite like normal cases of pneumonia, and then shortly after that, there turned out to be a strong correlation with cardiac and stroke events. So, although people still think of this as a respiratory disease, there is something else going on, we just don't know what yet.
> Various viruses, including the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), have been linked with autoimmune conditions such as type 1 diabetes.
Btw, obesity is NOT a risk factor for type 1 diabetes.
That's not surprising at all, since there's no correlation between weight and T1D.
Children with Type 1 diabetes, before receiving insulin, look like they are starving to death.
"Obesity, once rare in type 1 diabetes (T1D), is now an increasingly frequent problem (3–5). Accumulating evidence on the prevalence and consequences of obesity in T1D shows very clearly that this comorbidity is both underappreciated and poorly understood." .... " The considerable obesity burden in youth with T1D was confirmed, also in the T1DX, where the prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥95th percentile) was 13.5% in adolescents (mean age 15.4 years), with higher prevalences in those of black/African American descent (17.9%) and Hispanic/Latino descent (15.9%) between the years of 2010 and 2012."
The fundamental health issue with diabetes is managing blood glucose levels. This is best done with low carb meals with slow carbs along with small amounts of periodic insulin. But for some reason common advice for diabetics is to eat large amounts of fast carbs and then take large doses of insulin. This combination is just begging for added weight (and increased risk of insulin sensitivity to boot).
That's odd, I've been diabetic for about 10 years now and have never heard this advice from any doctor or dietician that I've seen.
I've heard from several americans that this was the recommended ADA advice (luckily changed at some point in the last 5 years or so).
However, outside the US it seems that the recommendation has always beem to minimize carbs.
While I’m sure there are plenty of nurses and doctors out there giving rushed and questionable advice, I’d be surprised to find that this advice is “common” (though many patients may “hear what they want” so to speak).
Author is a professor of biochemstry, who is quite well known as a good scientist (but it's likely much of his name recognition comes from sharing a similar sounding name to a more famous person ....)
It needs to be drilled into people of all ages that “recovery” is terrible terminology. Congratulations, maybe you didn’t die but you still may very well develop lifelong conditions that really screw up your body and your lifestyle (and, if that’s not enough, consider the healthcare costs).
Furthermore, if a person’s only complaint about pandemic rules is their “inconvenience”, it’s time to grow up. No one owes you convenience, and this is definitely the point in your life to figure out how to do what’s better for society. Put on a mask. Follow the rules. And learn more about this, from actual health professionals, not politicians with mile-long track records of lying.
Medical study: 455 persons exposed to a person with Covid19, non of the 455 persons became sick by the virus. Conclusion: very low infectivity https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32405162/
https://www.resmedjournal.com/article/S0954-6111(20)30166-9/...