Opinion Long COVID: a new word for naming fibromyalgia?, 2023, Xavier Mariette

SNT Gatchaman

SNT Gatchaman

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Long COVID: a new word for naming fibromyalgia?
Xavier Mariette

Long COVID is the name given to a syndrome comprising a wide variety of symptoms persisting more than 3 months after acute benign COVID-19, with a prevalence ranging from 10 to 80%. Symptoms are very close to fibromyalgia.

Several studies showed that long COVID prevalence was much higher after the first wave of the pandemics and was associated to the fact of thinking having had COVID rather than having had really COVID. Thus, it was the stress of the first wave with the lockdown and not the consequences of the infection that probably induced this high frequency of long COVID. Numbers of studies tried to find objective biological abnormalities for explaining long COVID but none of them could be replicated and convincing.

The concept of long COVID seems to be a repetition of history of medicine, in which the doctors and the society gave different names to fibromyalgia with the objective of trying to highlight the fact that fibromyalgia could be a somatic disease with a well understood pathophysiology and to avoid to focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. In conclusion, “to name is to soothe” as said by Roland Barthes. However, “Naming things wrongly adds to the world's unhappiness” was saying Albert Camus.

Thus, the term of long COVID, which suggests viral persistence of impaired immune response to the virus, is unappropriated and should be replaced by fibromyalgia-like post-COVID syndrome. Research on the psychosomatic and somatic mechanisms involved in these fibromyalgia-like post-viral syndromes must be encouraged.


Link | Paywall (Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases)
 
Contributors XM is responsible for the totality of the article.

Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

Patient consent for publication Not applicable.
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Invoking Roland Barthes and Camus in adjacent sentences, and Xavier Mariette MD is not even a psychiatrist?

So, I suspect that he himself must be suffering from Long Covid which is provoking this confusion of assertions. Which French writer should I quote about that denial?
 
Abstract said:
Several studies showed that long COVID prevalence was much higher after the first wave of the pandemics and was associated to the fact of thinking having had COVID rather than having had really COVID.
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Abstract said:
However, “Naming things wrongly adds to the world's unhappiness” was saying Albert Camus.
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Would an example of naming things wrongly be when people are assumed to not have had Covid-19 when they can't provide evidence of having had a positive test? Or perhaps setting the bar for the definition of Long Covid so low that nearly everyone qualifies as having it? Or perhaps labelling someone as psychosomatic because there is not yet evidence of 'objective biological disease'?


this paper said:
Thus, it was the stress of the first wave with the lockdown and not the consequences of the infection that probably induced this high frequency of long COVID.
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This paper makes me think of those delicate flowers in the US military who have increased risk of Long Covid on subsequent infections.
nature medicine - Postacute sequelae of COVID-19 at 2 years, 2023, Bowe, Xie, Al-Aly
People infected multiple times with COVID-19 are more likely to develop long COVID, and most never fully recover from the condition. Those are two of the most striking findings of a comprehensive new 3-year research study of 138,000 veterans.

Lead researcher Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, chief of research at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, spoke with Medscape about his team's findings, what we know — and don't — about long COVID, and what it means for physicians treating patients with the condition.
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So, many of the US military veterans in this study had survived war and did not develop fibromyalgia or GWI or whatever. And they had a first bout of Covid-19, perhaps even multiple bouts of it, without developing fibromyalgia or Long Covid or whatever. Instead, despite whatever level of fear they had about lockdowns and pandemics, they managed to recover. But, even with the knowledge that they had had the disease and recovered, somehow these military veterans were so frightened when they got the disease another time that they curled up in a corner and developed Long Covid?


Dear M. Mariette,
“The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
― Albert Camus
 
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Mariette is a well known rheumatologist who has contributed usefully to the literature on rheumatoid disease and has taken a particular interest in B cell depletion and practical issues around antibody levels.

It is disappointing to see him author this.

Maybe I should look in to submitting a reply to Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Mariette is a well known rheumatologist who has contributed usefully to the literature on rheumatoid disease and has taken a particular interest in B cell depletion and practical issues around antibody levels.

It is disappointing to see him author this.

Maybe I should look in to submitting a reply to Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.
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If you pen a response, you may be interested in pointing Prof Mariette to the new French official report on long Covid and post-infectious syndromes that I have tried to briefly summarize here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/news-from-france.18119/page-4#post-502432
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Long COVID: a new word for naming fibromyalgia?
Xavier Mariette

Long COVID is the name given to a syndrome comprising a wide variety of symptoms persisting more than 3 months after acute benign COVID-19, with a prevalence ranging from 10 to 80%. Symptoms are very close to fibromyalgia.

Several studies showed that long COVID prevalence was much higher after the first wave of the pandemics and was associated to the fact of thinking having had COVID rather than having had really COVID. Thus, it was the stress of the first wave with the lockdown and not the consequences of the infection that probably induced this high frequency of long COVID. Numbers of studies tried to find objective biological abnormalities for explaining long COVID but none of them could be replicated and convincing.

The concept of long COVID seems to be a repetition of history of medicine, in which the doctors and the society gave different names to fibromyalgia with the objective of trying to highlight the fact that fibromyalgia could be a somatic disease with a well understood pathophysiology and to avoid to focus on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. In conclusion, “to name is to soothe” as said by Roland Barthes. However, “Naming things wrongly adds to the world's unhappiness” was saying Albert Camus.

Thus, the term of long COVID, which suggests viral persistence of impaired immune response to the virus, is unappropriated and should be replaced by fibromyalgia-like post-COVID syndrome. Research on the psychosomatic and somatic mechanisms involved in these fibromyalgia-like post-viral syndromes must be encouraged.


Link | Paywall (Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases)
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:sick:
 
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