A Network Perspective on Neuropsychiatric and Cognitive Symptoms of the Post-COVID Syndrome 2022 Scharfenberg et al

Abstract

Many patients that were infected with SARS-CoV-2 experience cognitive and affective symptoms weeks and months after their acute COVID-19 disease, even when acute symptoms were mild to moderate. For these patients, purely neurological explanations are struggling to explain the development and maintenance of the great variety of neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms occurring after COVID-19.

We provide a psychological perspective based on the network theory of mental disorders as an added explanation that does not displace neurological mechanism but rather complements them. We suggest viewing the SARS-CoV-2 infection as a trigger that first activates nodes in a causally connected network of neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms. In the following, activation will spread throughout the network that will get in a self-sustaining stable and dysfunctional state manifesting in ongoing symptoms known as post-COVID-19 syndrome. The network perspective allows to generalize explanations for persistent neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms to patients that experienced mild or moderate acute courses of COVID-19, but also to similar phenomena following other viral infections. In addition, it could explain why some symptoms did not occur during acute COVID-19, but develop weeks or months after it. This network perspective shifts the focus from viewing persistent symptoms as a continuation of COVID-19 to acknowledging it as a complex syndrome that indeed originates from the disease but fully unfolds after it (post-COVID). To test the presented network perspective, we will need extensive cross-sectional as well as longitudinal data on cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms in post-COVID patients.

Open access, https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/10097/10097.html

 

Somehow, they present the same old model, exactly the same, without any reference to the hundreds of papers and studies all asserting the same going back well over a century. Or the fact that it's the current paradigm. Literally doesn't even recognize that this is the current paradigm, it's somehow yet again a novel idea, yet to be tried, but also supported by decades of evidence-based medicine. Literally both at the same time, old and new, tall and short, hot and cold, all at once.

Is there really no point at which hundreds of people can submit the same basic idea, never any more advanced than mere speculation, literally a doodle on a napkin stage of development, over decades and no one can give a damn? How can a scientific discipline even function in those circumstances?

How nice that they have simple diagrams showing their simple idea. It's just as valid as a diagram saying "you=stupid" and presenting it as evidence that someone's argument is invalid because the diagram says so. Or a judge whipping out a card that says "defendant=guilty" after 5 minutes and says he's seen enough, trial over, sentencing will follow quickly.

Just random words and arrows in boxes. This is completely unserious. The first step of the scientific method is observation. This is what happens when you don't bother to observe anything and just speculate wildly. Also:

The passive voice here. It's not "explanations" that are struggling to explain, it's an entire profession that has refused to do serious work on this. And they refuse to do the work largely because of a mindless process that keeps putting out the same idea over and over for decades. This is like the passive voice of "a bullet flew through the window and hit someone". No, it didn't just "fly by", someone pulled a trigger and made all the decisions leading to that.

The blameless approach to medicine is ridiculously destructive, it removes all responsibility while making the power imbalance even stronger. Professionals are supposed to deliver, an entire profession that has lost the ambition to even think it's possible for them to deliver is obviously doomed to fail. The entire social contract over what medicine does and their obligations needs to be reformed with great urgency.