Understanding Long Covid: German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s05BsmIq8mo

Panelists —

Michael Edelstein
Akiko Iwasaki
Marc Lecuit
Carmen Scheibenbogen

 

On the question of a psychosomatic cause of Long Covid —

(links to YouTube at relevant time-stamps)

Carmen Scheibenbogen
"And of course psychosomatic symptoms are probably part of the problem in at least a subset of patients. But I want to emphasise that it is not a primary psychosomatic disease in the majority of patients. It is just a comorbidity because of the very difficult situation these patients are in."

Michael Edelstein
"An illness can be caused by biological causes, the perception of it varies from person to person, according to his own circumstances, social-cultural norms etc; and that's not particularly controversial. [...] If you look at the proportion of the individuals that report long Covid symptoms and the effect of vaccination, it's remarkably consistent across the world, across cultures, across contexts. And a process that is entirely psychological - you wouldn't see that, because these processes are very much context dependent. Whereas biological processes are much more likely to be consistent across different areas. [...] That points towards a biological process that is going on. Whether it is modulated by your own perception of illness? Absolutely, but that's true for any illness and it's not a particularly controversial thing to say."

Akiko Iwasaki
"What we're seeing is that the immunological features alone are able to predict long Covid, with 96% accuracy. When we have biological data like that [...] there's no real need ... to invoke psychosomatic disease as a root cause. It is actually harmful to assign psychosomatic as a root cause of disease, because the way we monitor and treat patients would be quite different when we do that, and that is harmful when we know there are biological reasons why these people are suffering."

Edit: Improved YouTube links