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As with many aspects of the new coronavirus, researchers are trying to pull together data to understand the medium-term health effects more fully.
[...] Its impact on the heart still isn't clear, Dr Gallo says, but studies published in recent weeks describe abnormalities in the hearts of patients who have completely cleared the virus.
"[The researchers] asked them about their just general wellbeing and a lot of the patients are commenting on just being generally exhausted and having shortness of breath, some of them having palpitations, atypical chest pain," she says.
What's more, many of these patients weren't that sick with COVID-19 — most of them had managed their illness at home, rather than needing hospital treatment.
[...] Other persistent symptoms people report have to do with the brain: "brain fog", sleeplessness and headaches.'
[...]Fatigue, which is more than just a feeling of tiredness, and can be associated with things like a "foggy" brain, slowed reflexes and headaches, is usually a useful response to infections.
"There's a good reason for that — mounting an immune response to fight an infection takes a huge amount of energy," Dr Landowski says.
"The body wants you to do as little as possible, so you can conserve energy and divert it to the immune system.
Then, once the infection is eliminated, the fatigue dissipates.
"However, in some people, the switch that returns the body back to normal seems to fail, resulting in chronic fatigue."
[...] "Regardless of which cells it's infecting, if it's infecting cells in the brain, it could be causing damage, which could have long-term consequences," Dr Lawson said.
Even if the virus doesn't infect brain cells directly, inflammation caused by the virus could also cause damage to the brain.
Some experts are concerned the medium-term effects on the brain might have consequences that reach further.
In an article in the Journal of Alzheimers Disease Reports, experts raise the question of whether people who've had COVID-19, particularly those whose symptoms included loss of taste or smell, will be at greater risk of conditions including Alzheimer's disease after they recover.
The last-linked article from above (which is open-access), is excerpted here with links sprinkled on some of the unusual terms:
Some of the earliest neurologic findings were in those experiencing COVID-19-related anosmia and dysgeusia [2]. Important to this equation is that COVID-19 may prove to be a risk factor for future neurodegenerative disorders, beyond that which would be expected in the context of other comorbidities and genetic predispositions. Anosmia and the biological processes resulting in this symptom contribute to grey matter loss in cortical regions [3], which is similar to where pathognomonic amyloid plaques are often discovered [4]. Olfactory dysfunction has also been found to be associated with the graduation from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD, serving as a potential identifier for preclinical stages [5].
[...] It has become clear that many age-related conditions are found among those testing positive for COVID-19, though some of these are also related to lifestyle and family history. ... Systolic hypertension in midlife, rather than only late life, is associated with 18% and 25% increased risk of AD, respectively ... These cardiovascular risk factors are directly related to cerebrovascular consequences, such as hypoperfusion, a symptom strongly associated with MCI and AD [14]. Plasma exchange and albumin for AD patients with hypoperfusion, for example, has been shown to improve cognitive deficits and initiate cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amyloid-β (Aβ)...
Journal Reference:
Jack C. Lennon. Neurologic and Immunologic Complications of COVID-19: Potential Long-Term Risk Factors for AlzheimerΓÇÖs Disease [open], Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports (DOI: 10.3233/ADR-200190)
Got it! The millennials surviving COVID-19 today may have higher chances of an early onset of dementia than the baby boomers of today.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday August 03 2020, @04:14AM (5 children)
also reports of heart scarring and seizures. [smh.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @04:41AM (3 children)
Do they also get lyme disease to go with their chronic fatigue?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @04:44AM (2 children)
Let's not forget back pain and whatever else is difficult to disprove with imaging.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @05:23AM (1 child)
hemorrhoids too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @07:20AM
Pictures or it didn't happen. (challenge - do it w/o goatse)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday August 03 2020, @02:56PM
and...
Type 1 diabetes see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01891-8 [nature.com]
Kidney damage, see e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/03/severe-covid-19-can-lead-to-kidney-failure-medical-studies-reveal.html [cnbc.com]
And we're only 6 months in, the weirder stuff may be months / years down the road.
I've seen reports that 30% of survivors have signs of pulmonary fibrosis, if true, and if it progresses like "normal" pulmonary fibrosis that's a 5yr life expectancy tops - unless the next wave of covid gets you first (since we don't know how long immunity lasts).
There's a coronavirus in cats that is typically very mild, but two years or so later (so say 8 years for a human maybe) leads to death from weird and nasty autoimmune reaction - in significant enough percentage of cases for vets to have noticed and proved the connection.
To further complicate things, covid can be doing this stuff in at least 3 ways - direct viral attack, damage secondary to hypoxia, and damage secondary to thrombosis (blood clotting), oh and the hypoxia may itself be secondary to thrombosis. There are already doctors saying that covid should actually be treated as a vascular disorder rather than respiratory, I recall one autopsy study that found that all (100% of those examined) covid fatalities showed signs of pulmonary thrombosis. The list of long term symptoms could be taken straight out of a standard list for an (or at least one, the one I know only too well) existing known blood clotting disorder - low level neuro, stroke/tia, anosmia, breathlessness, chest pains, palpitations, chronic fatigue, various organ damage, and so on and so on.
Good news is that that clotting disorder is treatable with good prognosis for normal life expectancy (providing I don't get covid...). Bad news is that it is frequently life-limiting, the drugs are life limiting themselves, and the level of medical support required to get that life expectancy is going to be expensive (even with the NHS, someone has to pay for it, MRIs are not a pleasant way to pass time as it is, not sure I want to think about it combined with walletectomy). Multiply that up by the number of survivors and we have a problem (and Houston has a bigger one) - millions may be unable to work and requiring long term medical service support at way over "average for age" levels. The temporary hospitals we've built in the UK are actually still there, not just waiting for the second wave but also (allegedly) for possible mass post-covid syndrome.