Studying severe long COVID to understand post-infectious disorders beyond COVID-19, 2022, Brodin, COVID Human Genetic Effort Consortium et al

[Kalliope]

Moved post

Nature correspondence:
Studying severe long COVID to understand post-infectious disorders beyond COVID-19 by Petter Brodin et al

Collectively, we believe that our genetic and immunological studies of patients with severe long COVID hold potential for better understanding of this complex condition, and by focusing on severe cases that develop after mild COVID-19, we maximize our chances of success. Our results would probably be applicable beyond COVID-19 and will hopefully provide important insights of relevance into other post-infectious disorders such as myalgic encephalomyelitis

Spotted on twitter by Petter Brodin who comments:

 

[Mij]

Collectively, we believe that our genetic and immunological studies of patients with severe long COVID hold potential for better understanding of this complex condition, and by focusing on severe cases that develop after mild COVID-19, we maximize our chances of success. Our results would probably be applicable beyond COVID-19 and will hopefully provide important insights of relevance into other post-infectious disorders such as myalgic encephalomyelitis.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01766-7

 

[Hutan]

COVID Human Genetic Effort consortium - includes link to their website

To the Editor — As the COVID Human Genetic Effort consortium (https://www.covidhge.com/), we have studied genetic and immunological determinants of life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia1, multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C)2, resistance to SARS-CoV-2 infection3 and ‘COVID toes’4, and here we present our efforts to investigate post-acute COVID-19 syndrome, or ‘long COVID’.

 

[Wonko]

Not very impressive is it.

They seem to want to rule out everyone who wasn't in intensive care with covid as suffering from LC, they state that they wish to exclude pw psychosomatic complaints, implying they consider psychosomatic complaints to be a real thing.

I have no doubt they may be studying something, possibly something important, but what the rest of the world considers LC, they really aint researching that

IMO..

 

[Hutan]

The World Health Organization’s definition of long COVID is vague, which leads to concerns that a variety of conditions, including psychosomatic complaints, become intermixed with more severe, post-infectious organ dysfunction. To maximize our chances of identifying the human genetic immunological determinants of disease, we will focus our efforts on the most severe cases of long COVID available through our international network of collaborators and clinics. We will include patients with over 3 months of persistent signs and symptoms after PCR-verified SARS-CoV-2 infection. We will also limit our studies to patients with severe organ damage or dysfunction that can be objectively verified by imaging and physiological or biochemical–molecular tests (Fig. 1a). Finally, to distinguish these patients with severe long COVID from patients with post–critical illness syndromes, we will include only patients whose persistent organ dysfunction cannot be explained by the severity of the preceding SARS-CoV-2 infection or by the treatments or medical interventions experienced.

Yes, I was left feeling confused as to who they would in fact be studying. "People with severe organ damage or dysfunction that can be objectively verified" - so, does that mean 2xCPETs? tilt table testing? Or just people with heart or lung damage etc that shows up on a scan, and where the damage does not relate to the severity of their infection?

 

[Samuel]

> they state that they wish to exclude pw psychosomatic complaints, implying they consider psychosomatic complaints to be a real thing.

perhaps this bothers me more than it should but it does.

if you are going to use that word in any legitimizing context, then you need to define what you do and do not mean. best not to use it at all in a context like this.