We Just Got More Evidence That Long COVID Is a Brain Injury

All those people who refused to take COVID seriously have a lot of blood on their hands.
- Shout out to Physics Girl Dianna. Who is still bedridden.
  
  STILL? I haven't checked in months. That's crazy.
- They don't remember. On account of their brain injury.
  
  No, not everyone who got long covid didn't take it seriously. But the people who were super spreaders or spread misinformation are certainly to blame.
- But fortunately a lot of them don't care about such things as the quantity of blood on their hands, so news like this won't worsen their lives or self-image.
- They got their Applebees. Does’t matter.
- Vaccines has been around for centuries. It's people like you, who think they "know better" that are partly at fault for lots of COVID deaths.
  The worst part is you are not changing even when proven wrong, the vaccines saved hundred of thousands of people.
  Smh
  
  Remember how people like you said billions of people were going to die because they got the vaccines and then billions of people got the vaccines and didn't die? And then a bunch of people who didn't get the vaccines died of COVID?
  Because the rest of us do remember that. And we're still alive.
  
  Eh what a dumpster fire take.
  Also, if you wanted to try to fool simpler minds than yours into believing you are informed, and not an inbred mouth breather, at least attend to your spelling. 'Indites' is not a word. You and MTG really struggle with that one hey?
  
  where can i learn more about how bad things are? do you have any places you normally go to find out the truth?

Ooo interesting. The parallels with CFS are fascinating.
- I wasn't even aware of that. chronic fatigue syndrome was actually real.
  I thought I was just like side- depression.
  is there anything known about CFS?
  what causes it or how long it lasts or anything?
  I know nothing about it except for like a comedy sketch from the 2000s at some point.
  
  Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.
  Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @Neurologist@mander.xyz is specialised in it.
  Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).
  As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.
  
  CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.
  It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.
  That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.
  
  We all get tired
- What’s CFS?
  
  Chronic fatigue syndrome.
  It's another one like long covid where so much of the medical community thinks it's all in people's heads and not real, but unlike long covid it's less prevalent and thus studied less. We still don't know what it is.
  There's even some hopes that figuring out long covid might lead to new ways to look into what cfs really is.

I wish people cared about dealing with covid still. Once corporate America got that sign off not to care there was no going back.
- Seriously. I spent 2 days in the hospital last week with bilateral pulmonary embolisms after having COVID the middle of last month. I was NOT otherwise at risk for clots. A terrible surprise that I'll no doubt be recovering from for some time. I'm on a blood thinner for 6 months.
  
  Fixed your ED at least 😊👍🏻

great.
remember when all the politicians and people who control things got covid?
What a totally normal and cool planet this is.
- They were already shitheads.
  
  A bull in a porcelain shop is not gonna do much damage if the shop is next to empty.
- If it makes you feel any better, those demographics were already suffering from lead gas exposure.

I'm still afraid of long-c. I insisted that we wore masks in airports and on flights when we took a trip last month. We live life in a normal fashion everywhere else (because we're vaxxed and boosted), but I wasn't willing to risk that environment.
- Why just planes? Surely this would apply to all public transport.
  
  If they're US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they've ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it's likely the only one available to them.
  Signed, -An American
  
  Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
  
  I walk to work ten minutes to work. Partner and I each have cars. We take uber when we want to avoid driving.
- Do masks help the wearer? Last time I heard it didn't. Probably wrong.
  Either way, good for you...even if it only helps others that's a good reason!
  
  N-95 masks are protective, and to a certain (most likely lesser degree), KN-95 masks are also protective.
  
  They still block droplets from reaching the wearer.
  
  Masks help, but Masks plus Faceshield or some sort of eye protection is best.

As someone with long COVID, I can vouch the debilitating mental effects. I was teaching math to 4th through 8th grade students when I got it. I can remember standing in a classroom talking about a lesson and just having my mind go blank in mid sentence. I couldn't function. Not knowing what I was talking about or even where I was. Thankfully the students where very understanding and someone would finish my point I was making. I still suffer from it yet today, nearly 2 years later.
I have respiratory issues despite every CT scan showing nothing more than a couple of small pneumonia scars form long ago. I should be able to breathe just fine with no reduction of lung capacity. It stems from a lack coordination with my diaphragm - It runs backwards when I exert myself causing shortness of breath. Another sign of probable brain injury. And despite using a therapy tool to try and fix the issue, at best it just helps a little.
The upshot is I have pretty much stopped doing a lot of things I used to do because of the difficulties breathing and I spend a lot more time away from people due to an unreasonable fear of COVID.
It has caused me to retire earlier than I wanted to. And my life has greatly changed - and not for the better either.
- Sorry you're going through all of that. There obviously aren't any long term studies on it yet, but hopefully things will improve more and more over time.
  
  According to my Pulmonolgist - Nope. Her observations of all her patients over the years is that if you don't get over it in about a year, you don't get better. And she has been seeing more COVID patients than her "normal" patients for several years now. Long term care is going to be a real problem for society going forward.
- *a reasonable caution of encountering people with an unreasonable response to covid

What turns regular COVID into long COVID? When I got COVID I was better after 2 weeks but I had a nagging cough and chest discomfort for 2 months
- It's very subjective. You can read more about it by searching around, but the prevailing definition means people who had more severe reactions to the infection than the average patient, which almost unanimously means a severe and prolonged inflammatory response.
  What they are finding more and more is that this specific virus triggers undiagnosed or dormant autoimmune responses in patients. If you're familiar with Rheumatism at all, imagine a massive reaction to, say, twisting your ankle, but it goes out of control and causes swelling all over your body including your brain, lungs, heart, and renal system. This is actually what killed the most patients pre-vaccination.
  The full body assault of an inflammatory response just makes the body unable to cope, and things start shutting down. It can kill children and older people very easily if you can't get it under control. Many succumbed to Pneumonia, but those that lived had damage to their major internal organs from the inflammatory response. You can also see some had been using the term "Walking COVID", meaning people who had cleared the infection, but had long term sustained symptoms similar to Emphysema. They've since just moved on to calling everything "Long COVID". Some people recover, some people don't.
  This study finally identified the specific damage and detection to brain activity.
  
  People don't get it. The inflammatory process can do these sort of thing to any organ or system, or parts of them.
  People got a thing called COVID Toe. This is where you and every person already has some fungus that live on their feet and which gets into the skin and toenails. Maybe you have a little yellowing of the toenails or you're just "prone to athletes foot."
  Then you get COVID and suddenly your immune system is working overtime. The fungus starts to multiply faster and spreads more aggressively. Your toes start to get itchy and red, more than usual. They swell. They yellow. Then they start to crack and ooze, possibly requiring surgical debridement or in the most severe cases, such as where the patient already had diabetes affecting their peripheral nerves, amputation of the foot to prevent necrosis and sepsis. Imagine dying from athletes foot because your immune system was overwhelmed fighting a coronavirus.

Diana from YT Physics Girl has long COVID. Her very loving husband takes care of her. We all wish them the best and any kind of recovery.

- Tainted?
  
  Love?

So what I'm hearing you say is we should ignore it and act like all the people who correctly point out how dumb we're being are assholes.

Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19.
Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
[..]
In living brains of those with long COVID, however, conventional MRI studies have shown no structural abnormalities in the brainstem.
Do these people not proof-read their own articles?
- Normal hospital-type MRI scanners can't see inside the brain with the kind of chemical and physical detail we need. But with 7T (7 Tesla) scanners, we can now measure these details
  Not the best article, but I think what they are trying to say over multiple paragraphs is that new higher resolution MRI machines can see the damage that normal lower resolution MRI can't see
  
  what type of abnormalities are they seeing specifically?
- The abnormalities are only visible with a 7T scanner, and not conventional MRIs.
  
  yes, I can guess that explanation when trying to figure out the seeming contradiction. I don't read scientific articles to end up guessing because the author can't string together a well structured text. :)
- Dude read the rest of the article
  
  I have to choose what to spend my time on. If an article contradicts itself that obviously after I spent 2-5 minutes reading, I'll go look for more intelligent texts.