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.
there was publications about viruses "causing the host to be more outgoing/in public" in the lead-up to the part of the disease where you're laid up with fluids leaking out of every orifice. I'm fairly certain some flu and iirc sars-ncov-2 were found to display this secondary (or tertiary) effect.
So you "catch" a flu. Before you know you've caught it, suddenly you want to go out to dinner, or go to a meetup of friends that you weren't planning on, or go to the movies / a concert.
Your misrecognizing faces seems like it might have felt the onus was on you to go up to people you saw and say "hey how've you been!" which, if you were infectious, would be detrimental to other people but beneficial to the virus. maybe long-covid or whatever left that part of your brain miswired and it took however long for the brain to fix the feature.
As teens would say, "getting laid will give you a confidence boost and make you feel manlier". This is anecdotal, but I'd say that I've seen this happen.
Many common viruses like HSV are passed down to children do I'd say exposure is nearly impossible to avoid.
Kind of, in the sense that it sounds like a global news headline, vs. 'University of Exeter researchers find [...]' published by exeter.ac.uk, on this globally read site.
Edit: Ah wait, I think I get what you mean. By "global news" you mean it's been deemed worthy of sharing to an international audience by media outlets, as opposed to a crowdsourcing news source like HN. Is that right?
I mean when you write 'UK researchers find', especially to a global audience (which UoKentucky PR dept may not particularly have but HN does (Hello from the (the!) UK)) that it sounds more like the country UK than the.. no offence intended but not exactly world renowned university. (I've heard of Kentucky, probably my first time hearing of its university in its own right - though I might have assumed it had one.)
a lot of southern schools publish in a different fashion. Most of my agricultural and husbandry knowledge of the area i live in comes from various universities .pdf files. My point is merely not publishing in Nature (or wherever) doesn't mean that serious research doesn't occur at that campus. Their "customers" may just be citizens of that state (or in some cases, that county).
I don't feel like that is a correct way to measure an institutions mediocrity or not. I have found that frequently cited Universities that publish many very popular articles per year per journal become less credible with fame. Hubris aside objectivity becomes lost in the money being made.
A far better measure of a University would be the people it graduates or by assessing the actual effects and impact of a research University with their published studies.
If the University of Kentucky specializes in agricultural research, that's most likely why you've never heard of them - perhaps they've made huge contributions to the elimination of terrible fungus plaguing a specific crop, nobody would hear about that.
Fixing the proverbial fungus is a far bigger deal tho than most of the ambiguous pop science publications coming out of far more "prestigious" institutions these days.
I wouldn't read too much into it. UK is one of my alma maters. Everyone in that area of the US means "University of Kentucky" when they say "UK". It isn't a dig at the United Kingdom nor is it (I assume) an attempt to gain undue credibility by associating with the country. For the people there, UK as the University is simply the first order association for that acronym, rather than what is to them a faraway country that has no bearing on their day-to-day lives.
I don't think I am? I'm just agreeing the title should be different here, and it has now changed so either the submitted or a mod agreed.
> Everyone in that area of the US means "University of Kentucky" when they say "UK". It isn't a dig at the United Kingdom nor is it (I assume) an attempt to gain undue credibility by associating with the country. For the people there, UK as the University is simply the first order association for that acronym, rather than what is to them a faraway country that has no bearing on their day-to-day lives.
Right, that's what I meant about audience, and it making sense for the UoK's PR dept.
I was just reading on the BBC that people were having to go overseas for critical surgeries because the NHS so woefully incompetent that people were on many years long waiting list. So maybe put "NHS excellence" on the shelf next to "Empire" as UK delusions that have long since passed.
U of Kentucky is a pretty decent school, ~25k students with (from personal experience) excellent Civil Engineering and Chemistry schools, at least.
NIHR's research is genuinely world-leading. Any output from "a pretty decent school of 25k students" (U of Kentucky) pales in comparison to the research outputs from studies that NIHR grants fund, many of which are international collaborations. NIHR and "the NHS" are of course completely separate organisations, though NIHR studies recruit NHS patients and make use of NHS patient data for health research. The fact that you don't understand this says a lot about the judgment you attempt to make of the UK's life sciences research.
I'm sorry, but I must admit I'd never even heard of the University of Kentucky before today, and some basic research suggests it's not considered in the top 300 universities globally which is probably why. On contrast, there's plenty of universities within the top 100 (and top 10) within the (real) UK, particularly within the field of life sciences.
I was also pretty happy with the one-week turnaround the NHS sorted for me when I needed something potentially cancerous checked out (endoscopy). I didn't pay a penny for that, I don't pay a penny for my long-term prescriptions and I can see a GP same-day if I need to. Again, for free.
The reason for that is around 30 - 50 years of continual gutting of the NHS, aggressive implementation of perverse incentives and anti-targets (e.g. "hospitals get less money if they fail to meet X standard of care, because they do not have enough money"), and overloading of staff duties to reduce costs (e.g. Physicians now performing duties that receptionists used to handle, the lack of work force meaning they have to work long amounts of overtime on the weekend, the lack of rest contributing to bad decision-making, and so on).
typical austerity measures. The US and the UK power holders have massive incentives to privatize healthcare and schooling, so they de-fund and starve the beast with the sole purpose of trying to get people to support laws that turn public institutions into private ones. "a government small enough to drown in the bath water"
With healthcare this is especially disastrous. In the US for example, most smaller towns don't have a hospital and many don't have any doctors whatsoever, they have to drive a hundred miles or more to get care, and we spend a fuck ton of tax money medivacing (air lifting) these people to major city centers. These places used to have hospitals, but they weren't profitable.
Then these people get disillusioned with the system, are sold the lie that private healthcare will fix all of their problems, and politicians and health corporations runaway with the bag while we citizens in the US pay more for basic healthcare than any OEC nation while also having the worst health outcomes of OEC nations on par with so called "3rd world" countries. Its genuinely pathetic.
The US healthcare system is generally terrible for cost effectiveness but efficacy is very good for certain things. For most types of cancer, our 5-year survival rates are at or near the top worldwide.
> The US and the UK power holders have massive incentives to privatize healthcare and schooling
This is quite a wide brush that you paint with here. Fifty states in one country, and another 60M people in the UK across its four countries. This feels like classic HN overreach.
Speaking only about US public schools, as long as your community is mostly middle class or above, your schools will be fine, as most funding comes from local property taxes. Note: This is different than almost all other highly developed nations that fund education from state or national level.
The date range feels a bit arbitrary here. The difference between 30 and 50 years is enormous.
Also, I will get no love for this comment: Highly developed nations have no one to blame but their own democracy for failing to stop the slide. Why hasn't the same decline happened in Denmark or Japan or most other highly developed democratic nations?
There are multiple places that you can point at and go "this was the place where the NHS started getting gutted", it's entirely dependent on where you draw the line. There was an interval where it wasn't entirely obvious that this was happening, as well. Hindsight is 20/20.
It is not clear from your comment why always doing it would not be clickbait-like.
I am sure even the majority of Americans would assume that when the letters “UK” are used in isolation, it would mean the country and not a state university.
Title should have been edited for posting here because the namespace scope is global. E.g. the local paper here has headlines like "MSU reserchers get grant" and everyone knows they're referring to Montana State University. But there's other MSUs, just two states away, so the same article carried by Reuters would need the headline changed.
I meant they are not trying to trick people into clicking the link by using the term “UK” because it’s obvious from the context what they mean, since they consistently use the term.
I agree that it’s a bad headline for HN where you don’t know the context, but that doesn’t mean they chose the headline with ill intent.
It’s not ill intent to have your article seen by as many people as possible. I find it hard to believe they have never considered there is an added benefit to publishing, on a world wide medium, the term UK.
Researchers are identified by country when their research institution lacks recognition or prestige. If all we know is that someone is a U-of-Kentucky researcher or else that someone is a researcher located in the United Kingdom, the former carries more prestige.
I agree that the title should changed. Depending upon the reader's location, UK is a well known uni in the area. Also, the domain gave a good hint: uky.edu
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.
Could the spike protein push bad things through the blood-brain barrier absent an infection?
"Damage to the brain vessels mediated by the coronavirus spike protein (S-protein) and overactive immune responses have been identified as leading causes of this condition" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36810757/
No, the spike proteins have been shown to do damage. They aren't just a key. And yeah sorry I don't have a reference, I quit even thinking about Covid after my 3rd round.
3 rounds?? I got the original strain that went thru the US - I've only had it once. I just blood test done not too long ago and I still have measurable antibodies 3 years later, a low count - I'm due for a booster but I've never been vaccinated.
Not fully known but increasing evidence. Pretty stunning result is the discontinuity in all causes dementia for NHS seniors in Wales with the week of birth as the discontinuity point (week of birth is cutoff qualifier for a shingles vaccine)
> To provide causal as opposed to merely correlational evidence on this question, we take advantage of the fact that in Wales eligibility for the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) for shingles prevention was determined based on an individual’s exact date of birth. Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine.
Basically, the people born around that date are about as perfect a control-vs-experimental group split you can get in a large population.
This is only partly true. There are many different factors increasing risk for Alzheimer’s which include environmental triggers that cause inflammation which can include but are not limited to viruses, bacteria, aging, arthritis, surgery, injury, etc
It's quite possible that it's environmental suppression of immunity, aging and/or degradation of the blood brain barrier that permits the viruses to make their way topside. There's some evidence that the amyloid plaques actually exhibit antimicrobial activity and may be an immune response to infection. [1]
In my unsubstantiated opinion it's likely to be herpesviridae that make their way to the brain due to their affinity for nerve tissue and the fact up to 80% of Americans have HSV1. Separately 50% of Americans have cytomegalovirus, another herpes virus. And yet more have HSV6 and HSV8. It's safe to assume over 90% of Americans have some latent herpes-family virus.
It also explains why acyclovir and valacyclovir dramatically reduces the risk of developing dementia.
> In my unsubstantiated opinion it's likely to be herpesviridae
Curious, would this be hard to verify? To a layman that sounds like something that would be easily detectable under a microscope using samples of brain.
Viruses aren't detectable under a regular light microscope. We have other assays that can detect certain viruses but they aren't completely accurate. And getting a sample of brain tissue from a living patient is quite hazardous.
Histamine and MCAS have been adopted by alternative medicine as an explanation for everything, but it’s not supported by science. Dieticians like the one you linked have been coming up with theories for how everything is caused by either too much or too little histamine for years.
MCAS is particularly over diagnosed right now. The number of patients who think they have MCAS based on TikTok and Internet forums is so bad that most doctors have no choice but to assume it’s not a real diagnosis unless the patient has actually supporting test results in their file. Usually when you ask an “MCAS” patient how they were diagnosed, you get a long story about how their vague symptoms can be explained by MCAS according to something they saw on the internet.
The saddest part of the internet MCAS phenomenon is all of the people on Reddit and TikTok who have been convinced they have MCAS and can’t understand why all of the antihistamines and mast cell stabilizers and special diets aren’t fixing their problems. The fact that they probably don’t have MCAS and histamine doesn’t explain their symptoms just can be accepted after they’ve become immersed in online MCAS communities.
When you get ill and what the doctors give you doesn't work you have to research for yourself. Added to that you wonder if you'll ever get better.
My own research was the only way I got clear of an illness I had after what the doctors gave me didn't work.
It's easy to feel like stupid people are falling for reddit bullshit (and if course some are), but reddit is a potentially huge sample of empirical reports. Even if their reasoning is wrong it doesn't always mean they csn't find cures. That's how we got most medicines in history anyway.
Secondly reddit etc are full of highly motivated, desperate people. You might become one yourself one day too. The saddest part is their illness, not their trying to do something about it.
I've never heard doctors worry so much I might change my diet as when I read the Wikipedia entry on histomine intolerance.[1] MCAS is one thing, maybe, but the primary diagnostic for histomine intolerance is whether symptoms improve with changes in diet. So, if the whole of TikTok changed their diets with positive results, why would that provoke derision from the medical community as opposed to curiosity?
I think so. My uncle had quick case (meaning he died relatively quickly) and I think him having to have every single teeth pulled due to poor oral hygiene might have contributed.
This one theory that currently doesn't have a lot of hard evidence supporting it. It is a promising theory, but I don't think it is good to state it as if it is established fact.
A problem with that hypothesis is that Alzheimer's is very much found amongst the elderly while virus attacks hit all ages. Not saying that isn't involved but there's more to it.
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).
The wisdom of the wise men will perish.
Isaiah 29:14
For it is written: "I will make the wisdom of the wise men perish, and the intelligence of the intellectuals I will reject."
1. Corinthians 1:19
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, for it is written: "He catches the wise in their own cunning."
1. Corinthians 3:19
The wise have been put to shame. They have become terrified and will be caught. Look! They have rejected the word of Jehovah, And what wisdom do they have?
Jeremiah 8:9
your book doesn't have a single bit of insight into cell cultures, microscopy, viral interactions, immune responses or anything else we've figured out in the last few centuries.
its ridiculous to use such a thing to degrade modern intellectual persuit.
please keep your 1st century book of wooly mumblings in the tax free echo chambers where it belongs, adults are talking.
Isaiah, being Old Testament, is more about the defense of Jerusalem, and given even in the most literal interpretation, Israelis are as screwed as anyone else, I'll say some serious verse/context cherrypicking is going on here.
Corinthians, in the New Testament, as far as it is relevant has a better standing, coming from the standpoint of illustrating that Wisdom as it is to the Almighty looks entirely different to Wisdom according to mortals, for things happen in Eternity, that a population of transient mortals may not see or recall for generations. At best though, the scripture isn't indicating this is God's active intent/doing, but taken at face value Human Wisdom != God's Wisdom. Not necessarily useful on our timescales except as a reminder that things can happen that can completely turn established order on it's head, nothing is set in stone and impossible to see change, and that in those Times, it is important to remember we are not perfect, and to meet the adversity in question with humility, and a courage underpinned by faith. Regardless of the particulars of your faith, it isn't terrible advice or Scripture. Certainly more timeless than the Isaiah verse. 3:19 is much the same schtick.
Props for casting where angels fear to tread. It will largely land on deaf/unprepared/unwilling ears however. Then again, you got me to actually look at the book, so you might consider that a win I suppose. Given the room, don't be surprised if there is a poor reception.
Isn't everything set in stone from God's perspective? He knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. Including his own actions, presumably, so he's more of an omnipotent record-player than an intelligent being that makes decisions.
On the plus side, we don’t need to worry about spending our lives in an iron lung, smallpox is a non-issue, and in most of the west there isn’t much of a concern about a mother dying giving birth.
Hot water can be taken for granted, as can indoor toilets. And central heating.
With modern electronics and circuitry you can’t even kill yourself with a toaster in the bathtub since it will trip the central breaker.
Every generation goes through the same shit in one version or another.
All of this has been true for over half a century.
The problem is that the direction of improvement in lives has changed.
Compare today to the 90s and there’s very little reason to believe that today is better than the 90s in a developed country.
What’s frustrating is that we have MORE tools to be in a much better shape right now. We have things available to us today that people wouldn’t have dreamt of in the 90s, including smartphones. But unfortunately, those tools are being used almost entirely for the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and for disinforming and misleading people to accelerate the concentration of wealth.
Safer and more reliable cars, cancer is less deadly, the HPV vaccine, malaria vsccines, lower homicide rate, I could go on but this seems like a good list.
Be careful where you get your data - news is biased towards sensationalism and negativity.
I disagree. Reagan's plans, including legitimizing stock buybacks which were previously taboo stock manipulation, 'starving the beast' where a political party was willing to weaponize making the US government worse in order to achieve their ends, etc. are what is responsible for today's worsening environment. You are conflating current technical change with the results of decades olds political policies.
It certainly feels to me that we're simply at the logical end-ish point of 40 years of neoclassical policies that have encouraged the dismantling of society.
Except there’s a trend of slow reversal of the gains you speak of.
Polio was diagnosed in an unvaccinated man in upstate NY (2022) [1]
The anti vax movement and distrust of science has exploded since social media.
> of the west there isn’t much of a concern about a mother dying giving birth.
Depends on the state, or country. In the US, legality of abortion is left up to the states due to repeal of Roe v Wade by SCOTUS that’s hell bent on this Christian crusade.
Women have resorted to unsafe methods of abortion where traveling to an abortion clinic is not viable. In one case of a TX women, state courts refused to allow abortion to save mother [2]. She was fortunate to be able to travel to another state and get the medically required abortion.
You have to look at the statistics carefully. The hint in the New York story is “Rockland County”, which for these sorts of stories refers to a controlling, ultra conservative religious sect that is opposed to vaccination, amongst other things.
It’s important context because of the insular nature of these types of communities - the splash damage of a polio or measles outbreak has limited impact outside of the community.
Outside of these isolated areas, most of the slow burn is within the MAGA cult of personality, which will likely start to break and fade over the coming years, along with the pandemic memory.
We must fix that construct: "«distrust [] has exploded since social media»". Which makes some sense, it is expectable in broad terms.
In 2021 a large wave of communication appropriated the banner of Science, through voices that had clearly never seen science in a postcard. (It probably varied with regional communication.) So, distrust spread.
What you are seeing is a crisis in authority - which also causes the first phenomenon of the rise of ignorant voices.
distrust of science comes from the fact that something that had nothing to do with Science was called Science and used against people. Mind you that the scientific method is all about debating hypotheses not censoring dissenting voices, which is exactly what happened during the Covid era. Of course distrust will spread.
Step back, go to some exotic places for few weeks, mingle with locals and stay the hell away from any form of luxury. There is immense beauty in this world, if you care to look for it.
But for sure if you focus yourself on all the negative since its so juicy it will easily drag you down the pit of despair. At any point of time in mankind's history there was plenty of bad stuff happening, often cataclysmic compared to our times.
That view appears to discount just how horrible past generations had it. People living before around 1970 would have been in clover to have just those problems. Pick a decade in the past and it was generally pretty horrible.
When have people ever gotten a break? At least you make it into old age without good odds of getting an axe put through your head before that like most of human history.
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).
These are participants whose health is being followed long term. They had brain scans before and after COVID, and abnormalities were detected in the scans post-COVID.
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!
Oof, maybe see if you can budge word, etc retrieval with ventilating/monitoring CO2, intentional breath, and by trying different hydration electrolyte balances.
This happened to me following a concussion. I worked with a therapist who suggested a "game" that could help my word recall. Every night before sleeping, pick a category and try to name an example from the category for each letter of the alphabet. Choose a different category every night so you're always challenging yourself.
Of course there's no substitute for working with a PT who specializes in post TBI recovery.
I've gained a lot of my recall back (though not at 100%).
Yeah for sure. So say your category is "fruits and vegetables". You might say Avocado, Banana, Celery, etc. The goal is to challenge yourself, and it's more of a stretch than you'd think (but a good exercise). Or at least, it was a stretch for me especially at the beginning
Yea, I Just read that last week… of course I can’t find it now on my phone.
I have been using it all week. It concentrates the mind but on random things.. which helps with boredom and sleep. It also avoids spiraling down on a single topic which typically makes sleep harder.
They suggested not only thinking the word but also visualizing it. I have found it fairly effective this week
Wait, no, false alarm. I remember this happened before COVID. The first thing I remember having trouble remembering was the name of the game "Signalis". That was like a year ago. I'm mid thirties. So it's not COVID, I'm just demented. What a relief!! I should play Signalis again...
i've never had covid, and i am unaware if this is in the literature because it may not be directly caused by the virus; but, did you have a lot of trouble sleeping/staying asleep? Anyone can reply, especially interested if you have a fitness band/watch that tracks sleep and breathing/heartrate, if you noticed that your sleep was greatly disrupted by the disease.
I had some weird virus a couple weeks ago that didn't seem like it could possibly be contagious, there was no outward symptoms like coughing or whatever. But one of the symptoms was the inability to sleep. I think i got my personal best "without sleep without any chemicals" - i wasn't eating much because i wasn't hungry - like at all, so no caffeine or sugar, no medications that would cause sleeplessness. I was up very nearly 43 hours. And i had to force myself to go to sleep, because i knew the auditory hallucinations were going to start soon - i get em, they're more annoying than tinnitus, at around the 45-48 hour mark, and they get progressively worse. Prior to being awake 42 hours, i had maybe 4 hours of sleep total, and leading up to that i had been up over 20 hours - so my sleep was completely ruined.
Due to the lack of sleep, i cannot remember anything that happened that week, or the week prior. Nor what i read (i read two books), who i talked to or about what. It's just blank - not fuzzy, not hard to recall, just nothing there.
How do i remember any details? i was live-posting about how poorly i felt and why, went back and read them, committed my posts to memory.
I'm asking if the "brain fog" could be related to insomnia - like maybe the people who have the brain fog aren't used to not sleeping and a few weeks of illness where their sleep schedules are completely ruined may be enough to "throw them off" for months.
That is, by what mechanism does covid cause "brain fog" after the fact?
My hunch from having a similar disease that caused brain fog, and having read some of the literature as a layman, is that tiny capillaries are clotting in the brain. Or the lungs. Or wherever your viral load was heaviest maybe? It seems to last up to a year, meaning worsening or new symptoms could manifest. I would hope the plasticity of your brain minimizes that.
That symptom, from a different disease, only caused a serious problem after persisting for over a decade. Count on it going away, if you work, and rest, your brain. - Crosses fingers
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".
I'm not against vaccination. What is vaccination? An injection of deactivated bits of the disease into the bloodstream so the immune system can identify and begin producing antibodies against the disease prior to actual infection.
I'm against COVID "vaccines". What are COVID "vaccines"? An injection of mRNA genetic material that spreads around the body and reprograms your own cells to manufacture bits of the disease, so the immune system can blah blah etc.
Now please explain to me, why is the mRNA experimental gene therapy a required component of vaccination? Why couldn't they just inject bits of the virus like literally every single vaccine has worked since their invention? Why did we need to reprogram healthy people's cells to manufacture spike proteins that are like tiny little knives stabbing them from the inside, forever?
Well because vaccinating the population against the disease was never the goal. The goal was to push a mandatory genetic experiment and see if people react. They didn't. So get ready for your next round of mandatory gene therapy under the guise of "vaccination"!
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:
That article is from 2021 when people were just dipping into studying long COVID. If you do a search for the term, there have been multiple studies from this year on the site you're linking characterizing the observed effects of long COVID. And we haven't been in quarantine for a few years now at this point.
Nevertheless, it’s going to be hard to tease out causality. In addition to covid, there was the lockdown, and the tripledemic.
For example, I had two extremely mild cases of covid, but also long-not-covid symptoms from something worse (probably rsv, flu, or ???).
Similarly, there are a ton of psychological/developmental issues among covid-generation kids. For many, the lockdown and school closures were probably the main cause, but some probably have issues from covid itself.
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…
Your brian fog more than likely comes from excess inflammatory cytokines as a result of specific T-cell populations depleted by covid.
Maybe try fixing that by regenerating part of your thymus glad with growth hormone—-either endogenous via HIIT workouts or externally administered (see the TRIIM trial).
I have a similar experience, albeit with a different set of symptoms. I've been active and athletic all my life, never a problem with my blood pressure, after Covid I now permanently have high blood pressure and need to treat for it. All the doctors I've seen tell me that no, Covid doesn't do that, even though there's a clear cut line of before and after.
>All the doctors I've seen tell me that no, Covid doesn't do that
"Strong arguments support the thesis that, through various mechanisms, COVID-19 infection can contribute to the development of hypertension." [1]
At least some of the literature points in that direction. Have your doctors read the literature and concluded it's not a thing or did they just wing it because Googling is hard?
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, ...
That's the thing: all of the above applies also to depression. And yet we do have quite a lot of options for treating it. Granted, they are not guaranteed to work, but they are sometimes/often effective, especially if you try a few of them in a sequence.
After acquiring a bad case of mononucleosis at 18, I acquired CFS which lasted a number of years and severely impacted my ability to focus and make meaningful progress for extended periods of time, and this worsened my depression and anxiety, which exacerbated the problem in a positive feedback loop.
Everyone in my life disregarded me or didn't understand the severity of what I was dealing with. Looking back, returning to ADHD medicine back then might have been the best course of action, however a specialized treatment would be very welcome. Regardless of how others perceive the disease, people like me would greatly benefit.
I haven't specifically been checked for MS, though I have had a decently comprehensive array of tests done over the last decade before discovering I've had early-onset gout since my teens and it's likely that MS is something my doctors considered. Why do you ask?
Interesting. I believe over 90% of Americans contract mononucleosis by adulthood, so is there something about contracting it later in life which could potentially increase the likelihood of developing MS?
Almost all of my friends had contracted it as young children, when the virus apparently is less destructive. Thus, my experience of mono at 18, and with a compromised immune system, was considerably more severe than anything experienced by those I spoke to.
I was unable to do anything but lay on someone's couch for 6 months. I was homeless and couldn't work due to the severity of the disease and risk of spreading it, and so I had to steal food in order to live. It's unsurprising that the aftermath was equally unpleasant.
Given that it's difficult to judge whether or not a specific piece of medical advice is good or bad, many people will flag anything that's 1) not solidly established standard of care or treatment and/or 2) not backed by a very robust reference or citation. Yes, it's likely that some potentially valid advice gets nuked in this regard, but it also captures a lot of the bad.
Medical information couched as "I'm not an expert, here's my experience and some supporting references, your mileage may vary" tends to fly far better than doubling down on dissing opposing viewpoints or wildly novel and unsubstantiated information.
My view is that at best HN might raise potential treatments / practices which people should evaluate with a qualified medical professional. And yes, I'm aware that both access to and quality of same varies tremendously and can well be its own massive challenge. Particularly when capacity to seek out and engage with providers is itself limited.
From what I understand about ME/CFS, both post-exertional malaise and dysautonomia are symptoms- seems like stimulant use could make those things go either way
I think it's because it's a hard problem to understand and no one has got anywhere. They run all the tests on people suffering the symptoms but nothing useful pops out.
Funnily enough I was watching a vid yesterday on a potential breakthrough in another tricky illness - alzheimer's - where a researcher looking at passing on epigenetic information in nematode worms tried the same experiment in mice, knocking out a particular enzyme, and quite by chance produced alzheimer effects in the mice. Which now looks like it may have hit on the mechanism in humans. So maybe something like that? https://x.com/ydeigin/status/1828961739934695831
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.”
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.
ME/CFS cases about doubled after covid, and is not even known to be a thing by a lot of doctors. So the symptoms are easily brushed off as "get your shit together" or misdiagnosed as depression.
Also your anecdote aligns with the fact that it's more women than men who get it.
Sure, but depression and immune system seem to be linked, so how do we know we aren't just more clearly separating viral components in boughts of heightened depression?
Personally I think our relationship with flu tells us a lot about the difference between our claimed ideals and our actual behavior as a society. We didn't want to know anything about it for curiosities sake and we invented all sorts of higher priorities to not study the mundane diseases between pandemics.
Well, how is a doctor who doesn't even know about it supposed to either diagnose it or rule it out? Depression is also something you cannot just reliably diagnose from a blood sample or something, so just going "depression!" as soon as someone starts talking about brain fog and being listless seems unfair. Most Doctors think in categories, they don't want to challenge what they already know and have been practicing for years. So the most important thing now is education, spreading awareness.
I don’t want to be rude, but have you looked into the established scientific knowledge which has accumulated on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the human body?
I really truly don’t want to be rude. I only want to point to the existence of literature on this.
There are results from molecular biology, from the various medical specializations, from population-scale studies.
There are certainly symptoms and biomarkers. There are documented changes to physiology, and there exists at least some information on how to help the body recover.
I had low energy a bit along the ME lines after covid+shingles and it's not really that it's not known to be a thing with doctors - they've all heard of it, but with no tests, treatment or known mechanisms there's not a lot they can do apart from maybe test for other stuff or hand out general things like vitamins/antidepressants/painkillers. We need greater scientific understanding of what is going on really.
I got tested for other stuff - low T which I thought it might be or prostate cancer which the doc thought but neither of those. I'm recovering a bit through normal passage of time.
My wife (also in Ireland) got covid in the first wave in 2020 and has had issues with muscle function (weakness and paralysis) since. She's ok right at the minute, and these days her issues are intermittent - her last episode was in April. Maybe that was the last one? Or maybe not. It's been a tough 4.5 years
I’m sorry. It’s difficult to live with a sick partner, and most people can’t quite imagine the myriad of effects it has (unless they have also been there). You’re not alone if that helps.
I can tell you are bad faith because you either a. haven't done the most basic research to figure out the answer to that question or b. have and don't like the answer so you go around Just Asking Questions.
To repurpose an iconic phrase: You are quite zealous about knowing so much that just is not so. I asked a question and that caused your model of self and cognitive dissonance trigger to have struck a full scale alarm for some reason.
I encountered you types when I opposed the Iraq war and am therefore not responsible for mass murder and destruction and knew there were no WMDs too, but your intellectual brethren back then (perhaps yourself even) were also just as zealous about knowing what they know that was flashed on their brains through trauma just as today. Do you see no problem with the fact that it was the same plundering, lying, deceiving, evil, murderous government you now also just believe and fall in line with?
Why are you so fearful? Which of course it is, since no one with courage simply does and believes unquestioningly that which is most servile to there abusers.
That's me. One of the hardest parts is that people assume I'm just lazy, because how else could someone be as out of shape as I am? But the truth is that I love intense exercise, and even still try to do it. The body just doesn't respond any more.
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.
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).
The brain fog is hardest to describe. One symptom is that I confuse things much more easily now. It's like the resolution on concepts has gone way down. Instead of remembering a specific fact about a specific country (that I recently learned and resolved to commit to memory), for example, it's "some Middle Eastern country... or maybe it was African, but somewhere over there... did this thing where... something medical. Or maybe scientific." It makes socializing really hard. While using my multimeter recently, I convinced myself that voltage and resistance were the same thing, because they both fell into the "electrical" bucket in my brain. Even scarier, the double-checking mechanism failed, so that I didn't detect the absurdity for a while. It only resulted in a blown fuse, but I can imagine this kind of confusion having much more serious consequences.
As for physically, I just get winded much more easily -- and it's not the kind of winded I used to get, where if I pushed through, my body might complain but gear up to meet the challenge anyway. I just hit a brick wall where my heart and lungs won't give any more, either immediately or over the long run.
I've seen a mild improvement cognitively lately, though not sure why.
> So many hopes dreams flushed down the toilet, but people assume that I'm just lazy and stupid.
Reminds me of:
> The culprit behind “the germ of laziness,” as the South’s affliction was sometimes called, was Necator americanus —the American murderer. Better known today as the hookworm, millions of those bloodsucking parasites lived, fed, multiplied, and died within the guts of up to 40% of populations stretching from southeastern Texas to West Virginia. Hookworms stymied development throughout the region and bred stereotypes about lazy, moronic Southerners.
When were you sick? March 2020 here and while cognitively I have been ok, my heart and lungs are all messed up. Four years, three primary doctors, five cardiologists, over a dozen tests and still no real answers.
I tested as borderline COPD, given an inhaler and my lung tests improved dramatically, well into healthy range. However even with the inhaler I still get that "air hunger" sensation and the feeling like I cannot get a full breath in.
Oddly I got COVID this past July and most of my heart/lung symptoms disappeared the day before being sick, and did not return until a week or two after I recovered. I have heard this before in the LC community going back years.
Jan 2022 for me. I also have the "air hunger" sensation, but it comes in spurts. I was also perscribed an inhaler, and have used it a few times, but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact.
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.
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
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadSo you "catch" a flu. Before you know you've caught it, suddenly you want to go out to dinner, or go to a meetup of friends that you weren't planning on, or go to the movies / a concert.
Your misrecognizing faces seems like it might have felt the onus was on you to go up to people you saw and say "hey how've you been!" which, if you were infectious, would be detrimental to other people but beneficial to the virus. maybe long-covid or whatever left that part of your brain miswired and it took however long for the brain to fix the feature.
Many common viruses like HSV are passed down to children do I'd say exposure is nearly impossible to avoid.
Edit: Ah wait, I think I get what you mean. By "global news" you mean it's been deemed worthy of sharing to an international audience by media outlets, as opposed to a crowdsourcing news source like HN. Is that right?
Not entirely surprised we'd never heard of it.
A far better measure of a University would be the people it graduates or by assessing the actual effects and impact of a research University with their published studies.
If the University of Kentucky specializes in agricultural research, that's most likely why you've never heard of them - perhaps they've made huge contributions to the elimination of terrible fungus plaguing a specific crop, nobody would hear about that.
Fixing the proverbial fungus is a far bigger deal tho than most of the ambiguous pop science publications coming out of far more "prestigious" institutions these days.
I don't think I am? I'm just agreeing the title should be different here, and it has now changed so either the submitted or a mod agreed.
> Everyone in that area of the US means "University of Kentucky" when they say "UK". It isn't a dig at the United Kingdom nor is it (I assume) an attempt to gain undue credibility by associating with the country. For the people there, UK as the University is simply the first order association for that acronym, rather than what is to them a faraway country that has no bearing on their day-to-day lives.
Right, that's what I meant about audience, and it making sense for the UoK's PR dept.
U of Kentucky is a pretty decent school, ~25k students with (from personal experience) excellent Civil Engineering and Chemistry schools, at least.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/our-impact/making-a-differen...
https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/search/funder/NIHR%20(ODA)
I'm sorry, but I must admit I'd never even heard of the University of Kentucky before today, and some basic research suggests it's not considered in the top 300 universities globally which is probably why. On contrast, there's plenty of universities within the top 100 (and top 10) within the (real) UK, particularly within the field of life sciences.
I was also pretty happy with the one-week turnaround the NHS sorted for me when I needed something potentially cancerous checked out (endoscopy). I didn't pay a penny for that, I don't pay a penny for my long-term prescriptions and I can see a GP same-day if I need to. Again, for free.
With healthcare this is especially disastrous. In the US for example, most smaller towns don't have a hospital and many don't have any doctors whatsoever, they have to drive a hundred miles or more to get care, and we spend a fuck ton of tax money medivacing (air lifting) these people to major city centers. These places used to have hospitals, but they weren't profitable.
Then these people get disillusioned with the system, are sold the lie that private healthcare will fix all of their problems, and politicians and health corporations runaway with the bag while we citizens in the US pay more for basic healthcare than any OEC nation while also having the worst health outcomes of OEC nations on par with so called "3rd world" countries. Its genuinely pathetic.
Speaking only about US public schools, as long as your community is mostly middle class or above, your schools will be fine, as most funding comes from local property taxes. Note: This is different than almost all other highly developed nations that fund education from state or national level.
Also, I will get no love for this comment: Highly developed nations have no one to blame but their own democracy for failing to stop the slide. Why hasn't the same decline happened in Denmark or Japan or most other highly developed democratic nations?
I agree that it’s a bad headline for HN where you don’t know the context, but that doesn’t mean they chose the headline with ill intent.
It is a poorly written HN title though and should be changed
A replica of a key doesn't start a car: you need an engine too.
"Damage to the brain vessels mediated by the coronavirus spike protein (S-protein) and overactive immune responses have been identified as leading causes of this condition" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36810757/
> To provide causal as opposed to merely correlational evidence on this question, we take advantage of the fact that in Wales eligibility for the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) for shingles prevention was determined based on an individual’s exact date of birth. Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine.
Basically, the people born around that date are about as perfect a control-vs-experimental group split you can get in a large population.
In my unsubstantiated opinion it's likely to be herpesviridae that make their way to the brain due to their affinity for nerve tissue and the fact up to 80% of Americans have HSV1. Separately 50% of Americans have cytomegalovirus, another herpes virus. And yet more have HSV6 and HSV8. It's safe to assume over 90% of Americans have some latent herpes-family virus.
It also explains why acyclovir and valacyclovir dramatically reduces the risk of developing dementia.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55423-9
[2] https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.com/news/antivirals-for...
Curious, would this be hard to verify? To a layman that sounds like something that would be easily detectable under a microscope using samples of brain.
Sounds fascinating, where could one read more about this? I don’t think I’ve come across this before.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7882534/
[2] https://alzres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13195-021...
And here's a clinical trial that's been running since 2018, scheduled for conclusion at EOY 2024.
[3] https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03282916
This is a very in-depth hypothesis paper that explains more.
[4] https://core.ac.uk/download/544294788.pdf
Also mold causing mold toxin load, like e.g. ochratoxin A which causes cell death in the memory centres of the brain
[1] https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/caution-advised-with-low-his...
MCAS is particularly over diagnosed right now. The number of patients who think they have MCAS based on TikTok and Internet forums is so bad that most doctors have no choice but to assume it’s not a real diagnosis unless the patient has actually supporting test results in their file. Usually when you ask an “MCAS” patient how they were diagnosed, you get a long story about how their vague symptoms can be explained by MCAS according to something they saw on the internet.
The saddest part of the internet MCAS phenomenon is all of the people on Reddit and TikTok who have been convinced they have MCAS and can’t understand why all of the antihistamines and mast cell stabilizers and special diets aren’t fixing their problems. The fact that they probably don’t have MCAS and histamine doesn’t explain their symptoms just can be accepted after they’ve become immersed in online MCAS communities.
My own research was the only way I got clear of an illness I had after what the doctors gave me didn't work.
It's easy to feel like stupid people are falling for reddit bullshit (and if course some are), but reddit is a potentially huge sample of empirical reports. Even if their reasoning is wrong it doesn't always mean they csn't find cures. That's how we got most medicines in history anyway.
Secondly reddit etc are full of highly motivated, desperate people. You might become one yourself one day too. The saddest part is their illness, not their trying to do something about it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histamine_intolerance
This one theory that currently doesn't have a lot of hard evidence supporting it. It is a promising theory, but I don't think it is good to state it as if it is established fact.
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.
The wisdom of the wise men will perish. Isaiah 29:14
For it is written: "I will make the wisdom of the wise men perish, and the intelligence of the intellectuals I will reject." 1. Corinthians 1:19
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, for it is written: "He catches the wise in their own cunning." 1. Corinthians 3:19
The wise have been put to shame. They have become terrified and will be caught. Look! They have rejected the word of Jehovah, And what wisdom do they have? Jeremiah 8:9
its ridiculous to use such a thing to degrade modern intellectual persuit.
please keep your 1st century book of wooly mumblings in the tax free echo chambers where it belongs, adults are talking.
Corinthians, in the New Testament, as far as it is relevant has a better standing, coming from the standpoint of illustrating that Wisdom as it is to the Almighty looks entirely different to Wisdom according to mortals, for things happen in Eternity, that a population of transient mortals may not see or recall for generations. At best though, the scripture isn't indicating this is God's active intent/doing, but taken at face value Human Wisdom != God's Wisdom. Not necessarily useful on our timescales except as a reminder that things can happen that can completely turn established order on it's head, nothing is set in stone and impossible to see change, and that in those Times, it is important to remember we are not perfect, and to meet the adversity in question with humility, and a courage underpinned by faith. Regardless of the particulars of your faith, it isn't terrible advice or Scripture. Certainly more timeless than the Isaiah verse. 3:19 is much the same schtick.
Props for casting where angels fear to tread. It will largely land on deaf/unprepared/unwilling ears however. Then again, you got me to actually look at the book, so you might consider that a win I suppose. Given the room, don't be surprised if there is a poor reception.
Hot water can be taken for granted, as can indoor toilets. And central heating.
With modern electronics and circuitry you can’t even kill yourself with a toaster in the bathtub since it will trip the central breaker.
Every generation goes through the same shit in one version or another.
The problem is that the direction of improvement in lives has changed.
Compare today to the 90s and there’s very little reason to believe that today is better than the 90s in a developed country.
What’s frustrating is that we have MORE tools to be in a much better shape right now. We have things available to us today that people wouldn’t have dreamt of in the 90s, including smartphones. But unfortunately, those tools are being used almost entirely for the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and for disinforming and misleading people to accelerate the concentration of wealth.
Be careful where you get your data - news is biased towards sensationalism and negativity.
Polio was diagnosed in an unvaccinated man in upstate NY (2022) [1]
The anti vax movement and distrust of science has exploded since social media.
> of the west there isn’t much of a concern about a mother dying giving birth.
Depends on the state, or country. In the US, legality of abortion is left up to the states due to repeal of Roe v Wade by SCOTUS that’s hell bent on this Christian crusade.
Women have resorted to unsafe methods of abortion where traveling to an abortion clinic is not viable. In one case of a TX women, state courts refused to allow abortion to save mother [2]. She was fortunate to be able to travel to another state and get the medically required abortion.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/21/health/new-york-polio/index.h...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu...
It’s important context because of the insular nature of these types of communities - the splash damage of a polio or measles outbreak has limited impact outside of the community.
Outside of these isolated areas, most of the slow burn is within the MAGA cult of personality, which will likely start to break and fade over the coming years, along with the pandemic memory.
We must fix that construct: "«distrust [] has exploded since social media»". Which makes some sense, it is expectable in broad terms.
In 2021 a large wave of communication appropriated the banner of Science, through voices that had clearly never seen science in a postcard. (It probably varied with regional communication.) So, distrust spread.
What you are seeing is a crisis in authority - which also causes the first phenomenon of the rise of ignorant voices.
distrust of science comes from the fact that something that had nothing to do with Science was called Science and used against people. Mind you that the scientific method is all about debating hypotheses not censoring dissenting voices, which is exactly what happened during the Covid era. Of course distrust will spread.
But for sure if you focus yourself on all the negative since its so juicy it will easily drag you down the pit of despair. At any point of time in mankind's history there was plenty of bad stuff happening, often cataclysmic compared to our times.
[1] https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-clover/
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2011-005.pdf
Today it is at 5 per 1,000.
Please read a history book before you start supporting a reset to what we used to have.
It is not plausible to propose that 69-96% of patients, including children, had undetected brain disorders and that was the direction of causality.
If they’re only testing people with symptoms, the causality could easily go either way.
These are participants whose health is being followed long term. They had brain scans before and after COVID, and abnormalities were detected in the scans post-COVID.
Of course there's no substitute for working with a PT who specializes in post TBI recovery.
I've gained a lot of my recall back (though not at 100%).
Do you mean synonyms, or something else? Can you give an example of a category and A, B, C please? Thanks.
I have been using it all week. It concentrates the mind but on random things.. which helps with boredom and sleep. It also avoids spiraling down on a single topic which typically makes sleep harder.
They suggested not only thinking the word but also visualizing it. I have found it fairly effective this week
Hard to say whether the rest was actually necessary, but there’s reasonable evidence that it can help.
I had some weird virus a couple weeks ago that didn't seem like it could possibly be contagious, there was no outward symptoms like coughing or whatever. But one of the symptoms was the inability to sleep. I think i got my personal best "without sleep without any chemicals" - i wasn't eating much because i wasn't hungry - like at all, so no caffeine or sugar, no medications that would cause sleeplessness. I was up very nearly 43 hours. And i had to force myself to go to sleep, because i knew the auditory hallucinations were going to start soon - i get em, they're more annoying than tinnitus, at around the 45-48 hour mark, and they get progressively worse. Prior to being awake 42 hours, i had maybe 4 hours of sleep total, and leading up to that i had been up over 20 hours - so my sleep was completely ruined.
Due to the lack of sleep, i cannot remember anything that happened that week, or the week prior. Nor what i read (i read two books), who i talked to or about what. It's just blank - not fuzzy, not hard to recall, just nothing there.
How do i remember any details? i was live-posting about how poorly i felt and why, went back and read them, committed my posts to memory.
But it seems likely it's something that could be from any virus.
That is, by what mechanism does covid cause "brain fog" after the fact?
That symptom, from a different disease, only caused a serious problem after persisting for over a decade. Count on it going away, if you work, and rest, your brain. - Crosses fingers
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".
I'm against COVID "vaccines". What are COVID "vaccines"? An injection of mRNA genetic material that spreads around the body and reprograms your own cells to manufacture bits of the disease, so the immune system can blah blah etc.
Now please explain to me, why is the mRNA experimental gene therapy a required component of vaccination? Why couldn't they just inject bits of the virus like literally every single vaccine has worked since their invention? Why did we need to reprogram healthy people's cells to manufacture spike proteins that are like tiny little knives stabbing them from the inside, forever?
Well because vaccinating the population against the disease was never the goal. The goal was to push a mandatory genetic experiment and see if people react. They didn't. So get ready for your next round of mandatory gene therapy under the guise of "vaccination"!
The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?q=long%20covid&allSite...
For example, I had two extremely mild cases of covid, but also long-not-covid symptoms from something worse (probably rsv, flu, or ???).
Similarly, there are a ton of psychological/developmental issues among covid-generation kids. For many, the lockdown and school closures were probably the main cause, but some probably have issues from covid itself.
Maybe try fixing that by regenerating part of your thymus glad with growth hormone—-either endogenous via HIIT workouts or externally administered (see the TRIIM trial).
"Strong arguments support the thesis that, through various mechanisms, COVID-19 infection can contribute to the development of hypertension." [1]
At least some of the literature points in that direction. Have your doctors read the literature and concluded it's not a thing or did they just wing it because Googling is hard?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10856065/
Everyone in my life disregarded me or didn't understand the severity of what I was dealing with. Looking back, returning to ADHD medicine back then might have been the best course of action, however a specialized treatment would be very welcome. Regardless of how others perceive the disease, people like me would greatly benefit.
Perhaps you can get a single attack of MS but not get (many) more. Certainly fatigue is one symptom of MS. Blurred / double vision is another.
Almost all of my friends had contracted it as young children, when the virus apparently is less destructive. Thus, my experience of mono at 18, and with a compromised immune system, was considerably more severe than anything experienced by those I spoke to.
I was unable to do anything but lay on someone's couch for 6 months. I was homeless and couldn't work due to the severity of the disease and risk of spreading it, and so I had to steal food in order to live. It's unsurprising that the aftermath was equally unpleasant.
The irony of warning not to take medical advice on HN, and then proceeding to offer alternative medical advice...
This, despite the fact that Doctors do actually prescribe stimulants for CFS.
Medical information couched as "I'm not an expert, here's my experience and some supporting references, your mileage may vary" tends to fly far better than doubling down on dissing opposing viewpoints or wildly novel and unsubstantiated information.
Dang's somewhat adjacent commentary: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20078667> (in the context of someone requesting that bad medical advice be flagged).
My view is that at best HN might raise potential treatments / practices which people should evaluate with a qualified medical professional. And yes, I'm aware that both access to and quality of same varies tremendously and can well be its own massive challenge. Particularly when capacity to seek out and engage with providers is itself limited.
Funnily enough I was watching a vid yesterday on a potential breakthrough in another tricky illness - alzheimer's - where a researcher looking at passing on epigenetic information in nematode worms tried the same experiment in mice, knocking out a particular enzyme, and quite by chance produced alzheimer effects in the mice. Which now looks like it may have hit on the mechanism in humans. So maybe something like that? https://x.com/ydeigin/status/1828961739934695831
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 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.
Also your anecdote aligns with the fact that it's more women than men who get it.
How is a doctor, who could see hundreds of patients a week supposed to know ?
Personally I think our relationship with flu tells us a lot about the difference between our claimed ideals and our actual behavior as a society. We didn't want to know anything about it for curiosities sake and we invented all sorts of higher priorities to not study the mundane diseases between pandemics.
I really truly don’t want to be rude. I only want to point to the existence of literature on this.
There are results from molecular biology, from the various medical specializations, from population-scale studies.
There are certainly symptoms and biomarkers. There are documented changes to physiology, and there exists at least some information on how to help the body recover.
I got tested for other stuff - low T which I thought it might be or prostate cancer which the doc thought but neither of those. I'm recovering a bit through normal passage of time.
I encountered you types when I opposed the Iraq war and am therefore not responsible for mass murder and destruction and knew there were no WMDs too, but your intellectual brethren back then (perhaps yourself even) were also just as zealous about knowing what they know that was flashed on their brains through trauma just as today. Do you see no problem with the fact that it was the same plundering, lying, deceiving, evil, murderous government you now also just believe and fall in line with?
Why are you so fearful? Which of course it is, since no one with courage simply does and believes unquestioningly that which is most servile to there abusers.
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!
Are they improving?
As for physically, I just get winded much more easily -- and it's not the kind of winded I used to get, where if I pushed through, my body might complain but gear up to meet the challenge anyway. I just hit a brick wall where my heart and lungs won't give any more, either immediately or over the long run.
I've seen a mild improvement cognitively lately, though not sure why.
I'm getting better, but I feel like I relapse occasionally. Extra sleep seems to help me a lot.
I work from home, and I'm generally pretty careful, I got it the other times in places you wouldn't really expect like drive throughs.
The first case was by far the worst though.
Reminds me of:
> The culprit behind “the germ of laziness,” as the South’s affliction was sometimes called, was Necator americanus —the American murderer. Better known today as the hookworm, millions of those bloodsucking parasites lived, fed, multiplied, and died within the guts of up to 40% of populations stretching from southeastern Texas to West Virginia. Hookworms stymied development throughout the region and bred stereotypes about lazy, moronic Southerners.
* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
Oddly I got COVID this past July and most of my heart/lung symptoms disappeared the day before being sick, and did not return until a week or two after I recovered. I have heard this before in the LC community going back years.
good luck!
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