Higher level of physical activity reduces mental and neurological symptoms during and 2 years after COVID-19 infection in young women, 2024, Takács et

Abstract

Previous studies found that regular physical activity (PA) can lower the risk of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection and post-COVID-19 condition (PCC), yet its specific effects in young women have not yet been investigated. Thus, we aimed to examine whether regular physical activity reduces the number of symptoms during and after COVID-19 infection among young women aged between 18 and 34 (N = 802), in which the confounding effect of other morbidities could be excluded.

The average time since infection was 23.5 months. Participants were classified into low, moderate, and high PA categories based on the reported minutes per week of moderate and vigorous PA. Using the Post-COVID-19 Case Report Form, 50 different symptoms were assessed. Although regular PA did not decrease the prevalence of COVID-19 infection and PCC but significantly reduced the number of mental and neurological symptoms both in acute COVID-19 and PCC.

Importantly, the high level of PA had a greater impact on health improvements. In addition, the rate of reinfection decreased with an increased level of PA. In conclusion, a higher level of regular PA can reduce the risk of reinfection and the number of mental and neurological symptoms in PCC underlying the importance of regular PA, even in this and likely other viral disease conditions.

Open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57646-2

 

One of the post-covid studies funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. There a few mentions of PEM:

 

How did they define and measure PEM?
Can we be sure that they are not confounding fatigability as this seems to be an issue elsewhere ?

 

So they've found that X is associated with lower Y and their conclusion is that X "reduces" Y.

 

Illness largely defined by inability to exert observed less in people able to exert themselves more.

"Higher levels of spending reduces financial symptoms during and 2 years after significant loss of income"

Notice how the title is explicitly framed as causative: you exert more, you will be less ill. Even though they cannot make such a causative claim based on the data they have. Different rules when it comes to disputed illnesses.

 

Why young women between 18 and 34? Is there something special about that gender/age?

 

Trial By Error: Yet Another Long Covid Study with Bogus Claims Published by a Prestige Journal

"I’ve recently spent some time lambasting a Long Covid study in The BMJ that claimed a rehab program addressing both physical and mental health was “clinically effective”—even though the primary outcome results fell below the recommended level for what would be considered “minimal clinically important difference” on the measure in question. Now another high impact journal has published another Long Covid study that also engages in unacceptable methodological shenanigans."

https://virology.ws/2024/04/04/tria...bogus-claims-published-by-a-prestige-journal/

 

Worth noting that Nature Scientific Reports isn't a particularly prestigious journal @dave30th, it's by far the least significant publication attached to Nature. Some of the controversies on its wikipedia page include:

- The face of Donald Trump was hidden in an image of baboon feces in a paper published in 2018. The journal later removed the image.

- A controversial 2018 paper suggested that too much bent-neck staring at a cell phone could grow a "horn" on the back of someone's head. The study also failed to mention the conflict of interests of the first author.

- It took Scientific Reports more than four years to retract a plagiarized study from a bachelor's thesis of a Hungarian mathematician. The paper, entitled "Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks", was published in December 2015, and the plagiarism was reported in January 2016 by the former bachelor student. In April 2020, the paper was retracted.

- A study published in the journal on June 24, 2019, claimed that fluctuations in the sun were causing global warming. Based on severe criticism from the scientific community, Scientific Reports started an investigation on the validity of this study, and it was retracted by the editors in March 2020

- A paper published in July 2020, which said body weight can be correlated with being honest or dishonest, caused consternation among social media users, questioning why Scientific Reports agreed to publish this paper. The paper was eventually retracted in January 2021.

- A paper published in September 2021 implied that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been a retelling of an exploding asteroid around the year 1,650 BCE. The paper received criticism on social media and by data sleuths for using a doctored image.

And there's far more from where that came! I'm sure some decent research is published in Scientific Reports, but it also clearly publishes a great deal of (rather amusing) nonsense.

 

I expect more to come from this team about physical rehabilitation of pwLC and the power of sports. Great blog post though.

Are you going to write to the journal, @dave30th ? Sounds like it.

 

Trial By Error: My Letter to Scientific Reports about New Study of Physical Activity and Long Covid

"The other day I posted a blog about yet another problematic Long Covid study published by a major journal. The study concluded that physical activity (PA) can “reduce” symptoms in young women with prolonged medical complaints after Covid-19, or what the authors call post-COVID condition (PCC). The problem: the study design is capable of documenting associations but not causal relationships—such as the relationship described by the use of the verb “to reduce.”

This morning I sent the following letter to Dr Rafal Marszalek, the top editor at Scientific Reports, the journal from the Nature group that published the study."

https://virology.ws/2024/04/07/tria...ew-study-of-physical-activity-and-long-covid/

 

Wow, thanks for all those examples, which I hadn't bothered to look up. Looks like a good excuse for a follow-up post! On the issue of whether it's prestigious, I think it's fair to say that any journal under the Nature umbrella is a prestigious journal just by virtue of being part of Nature. Obviously that's different from calling it a quality journal! The BMJ also publishes lots of crap, like the recent Warwick study of LC rehab, but it's still a prestigious journal.

Who knows if I'll get a response? But I thought it was important to put the issue on the record.

 

Guys, I think we could do at least as well between us for next 1 April!