faetal on 24/1/2022 at 12:48
If it's related to autoantibodies, then vaccination and infection could cause it. The difference being that vaccination doesn't come with the other COVID stuff, and if we discover which peptides are responsible for the auto-antibodies, there is possibility to modify the vaccines.
lowenz on 24/1/2022 at 14:15
Exactly!
About the clot thesis/interpretation, the apixaban can solve the problem with no consequences (but being *monitored* in an hospital, not @home as a form of prophylaxis).
faetal on 24/1/2022 at 16:11
As with any medicine done at a global level, it'll have to be about balancing frequency vs severity of virus / vaccine / blood-thinners side-effects.
Virus is obviously the highest risk as the frequency x severity of unwanted effects are in line with a full-blown infection to first-timers (and nth-timers with either dysfunctional immune response, or poor natural immunity due to viral impact on B cell response phenotype), so vaccine immunity is always going to be preferable unless someone is allergic to an ingredient.
As an intervention for potential vaccine side-effects, blood thinners are nothing to fuck with, so I wouldn't imagine it'll be an easy thing to devise blanket rules for.
For long COVID, the micro-clots involvement is going to need to be fully validated and checked vs the role of auto-antibodies.
There may be some "a hammer sees the whole world as a nail style" stuff going on, with blood people seeing clots as the issue and immunologists are seeing auto-Abs as the issue.
As with everything biology, the answer is likely to be a whole lot more complex, e.g. some from column a, some from column b, some a*b, some a xor b, modulation / exacerbation from an unknown column c etc.
What's going to be considered worse - foggy brain and loss of smell, or dying of a quiet bleed in your sleep?
You might be able to justify it with people who are high risk for clots, but I'd imagine the more severe end of that scale may be on some kind of blood thinners anyway.
This is why I never wanted to be a medic - fuck having to flow chart all of that in a 15 minute sitting!
faetal on 24/1/2022 at 21:10
With as many people as there are being vaccinated, you can more or less get anything happening after the vaccine is administered, which is then being attributed to it (as you can imagine, the antivaxxers are keen to amplify this for anything relating to illness).
By the end of this thing, there will be enough data to statistically rule in or out things caused by the vaccine, but at this point, I'm not paying any mind to anything which isn't coming out of properly designed studies.
I'm guessing the Indian articles are meant to be tongue in cheek.
mopgoblin on 24/1/2022 at 23:20
Based on my highly scientific observations so far the vaccine has a 67% chance of causing cider-consumption-related side effects that evening, and a 33% chance of causing my breadmaker to break down within 72 hours
lowenz on 25/1/2022 at 12:52
Quote Posted by mopgoblin
and a 33% chance of causing my breadmaker to break down within 72 hours
Conspiracy of the breadmaker makers! They can't hide anym0r3!!!111
lowenz on 9/2/2022 at 21:33
(
https://www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-takes-serious-toll-heart-health-full-year-after-recovery)
From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrythmias, and heart failure.
Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus' impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans' health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn't. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected.
The results are “stunning ... worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. ... If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it's not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”
Others agree the results of the study, published in Nature Medicine on 7 February, are powerful. “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, who recently conducted a similar, much smaller analysis. She cautions that the new study will need to be replicated, and that it was retrospective, possibly introducing inaccuracies such as incorporating faulty diagnoses from patient records. “It looked back. We have to do prospective studies to calculate accurate estimates.”
Nor do researchers know how the virus orchestrates this long-term damage. But they think the cardiovascular risks and the constellation of symptoms collectively known as Long Covid (which include brain fog, fatigue, weakness, and loss of smell) could have common roots.
“This is clearly evidence of long-term heart and vascular damage. Similar things could be happening in the brain and other organs resulting in symptoms characteristic of Long Covid, including brain fog,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St Louis Health Care system.It's not "strictly" the virus, it's the immune system gone fubar as the infection outcome.
Azaran on 9/2/2022 at 21:58
Quote Posted by lowenz
It's not "strictly" the virus, it's the immune system gone fubar as the infection outcome.
I wonder if there's a drug that can prevent that entirely, while allowing the immune cells to fight the virus normally?
In other news, the(
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-offers-strongest-proof-yet-of-vitamin-ds-power-to-fight-covid/) most solid evidence yet for Vitamin D
Quote:
Israel scientists say they have gathered the most convincing evidence to date that increased vitamin D levels can help COVID-19 patients reduce the risk of serious illness or death.
Researchers from Bar Ilan University and the Galilee Medical Center say that the vitamin has such a strong impact on disease severity that they can predict how people would fare if infected based on nothing more than their ages and vitamin D levels.
Lacking vitamin D significantly increases danger levels, they concluded in newly peer-reviewed research published Thursday in the journal PLOS One.
The study is based on research conducted during Israel's first two waves of the virus, before vaccines were widely available, and doctors emphasized that vitamin supplements were not a substitute for vaccines, but rather a way to keep immunity levels from falling.
Vitamin D deficiency is endemic across the Middle East, including in Israel, where nearly four in five people are low on the vitamin, according to one study from 2011. By taking supplements before infection, though, the researchers in the new Israeli study found that patients could avoid the worst effects of the disease.
“We found it remarkable, and striking, to see the difference in the chances of becoming a severe patient when you are lacking in vitamin D compared to when you're not,” said Dr. Amiel Dror, a Galilee Medical Center physician and Bar Ilan researcher who was part of the team behind the study.
He noted that his study was conducted pre-Omicron, but said that the coronavirus doesn't change fundamentally enough between variants to negate vitamin D effectiveness.
“What we're seeing when vitamin D helps people with COVID infections is a result of its effectiveness in bolstering the immune systems to deal with viral pathogens that attack the respiratory system,” he told The Times of Israel. “This is equally relevant for Omicron as it was for previous variants.”
Health authorities in Israel and several other countries have recommended vitamin D supplements in response to the coronavirus pandemic, though data on its effectiveness has been sparse until now.
In June, researchers published preliminary findings showing that 26 percent of coronavirus patients died if they were vitamin D deficient soon before hospitalization, compared to 3% who had normal levels of vitamin D.
They also determined that hospitalized patients who were vitamin D deficient were 14 times more likely, on average, to end up in severe or critical condition than others.While the scientific community recognized the importance of the results, questions arose as to whether recent health conditions among the patients might have been skewing the results.
The possibility was raised that patients could have been suffering from conditions that both reduce vitamin D levels and increase vulnerability to serious illness from COVID-19, meaning the vitamin deficiency would be a symptom rather than a contributing factor in disease severity.
To zero out that possibility, Dror's team delved deeper into the data, examining each of its patients' vitamin D levels over the two-year stretch before coronavirus infection. They found that the strong correlation between sufficient vitamin D levels and ability to fight the coronavirus still held, and the level of increased danger in their preliminary findings remained almost identical.
“We checked a range of timeframes, and found that wherever you look over the two years before infection, the correlation between vitamin D and disease severity is extremely strong,” Dror said.“Because this study gets such a good picture of patients' vitamin D levels, by looking at a wide timeframe instead of just the time around hospitalization, it offers much stronger support than anything seen so far emphasizing the importance of boosting vitamin D levels during the pandemic,” he added.
A flood of dubious claims about natural remedies to the coronavirus, including a theory that Israelis had immunized themselves with lemons and baking soda, have left some skeptical about claims of vitamins warding off the virus.
But Dror insisted that his team's research showed that the importance of vitamin D was not based on incomplete or flawed data.
“People should learn from this that studies pointing to the importance of taking vitamin D are very reliable, and aren't based on skewed data,” he said. “And it emphasizes the value of everyone taking a vitamin D supplement during the pandemic, which, consumed in sensible amounts in accordance with official advice, doesn't have any downside.”
