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Tag: microclots

Long COVID still has no cure — so these patients are turning to research

When Lisa McCorkell got COVID-19 in March 2020, her symptoms were mild. Her physicians told her to isolate from others and that she would recover in a few weeks. But the weeks stretched into months and McCorkell, who was working on a master’s degree in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, started having debilitating and bewildering symptoms: fatigue, dizziness and shortness of breath. Previously an avid runner, McCorkell found her heart racing from simple efforts.

She struggled to find an explanation, and soon realized that her physicians didn’t know any more about her condition than she did. To complicate matters, the limited availability of high-quality testing for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in the early days of the pandemic left many of her doctors wondering whether her symptoms were really due to COVID-19 at all. “I didn’t have health-care providers that took me seriously,” McCorkell says. “That largely pushed me out of the health-care system.”

McCorkell turned instead to those who were experiencing the same puzzling symptoms and frustrations, joining a support group for people with what would eventually be called long COVID. As they compared notes, McCorkell and a handful of others — many of whom had research experience — realized that the information they were sharing might be helpful not only for those with long COVID, but also for those looking to study the condition. So, they founded a non-profit organization, called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC), to design, provide advice on and even fund basic and clinical research into long COVID and other chronic illnesses.

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Long-COVID signatures identified in huge analysis of blood proteins

Researchers have developed a computational model that predicts how likely a person is to develop long COVID, based on an analysis of more than 6,500 proteins found in blood.

In a study published on 18 January in Science, the team compared blood samples from people who tested positive for COVID-19 with ones from healthy adults, and found notable differences in the composition of proteins in people with long COVID, those who recovered and those who were never infected.

The analysis suggests that proteins involved in immune responses, blood clotting and inflammation could be key biomarkers in diagnosing and monitoring long COVID, which affects an estimated 65 million people worldwide.

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Long Covid causes changes in body that make exercise debilitating – study

Many people with long Covid feel tired, unwell and in pain for lengthy periods after exercise, and researchers say they now know why.

Experts say they have evidence that biological changes are to blame, such as severe muscle damage, mitochondrial problems and the presence of microclots in the body.

“It’s really confirming that there is something inside the body going wrong with the disease,” said Dr Rob Wüst, an author of the study at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam.

Long Covid is thought to affect tens of thousands of people in the UK alone, and many experience a worsening of symptoms for weeks after a single bout of exercise.

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Long COVID: The hunt for causes and cures

Hannah Davis misses her old self. Like so many people around the world, she has seen her life upended by long COVID, which has made many once-routine activities impossible. The 32-year-old has stopped working at her job in the field of machine learning and generative models. It’s too cognitively taxing; the lights from display monitors are disorienting. Merely standing up from a sitting position causes her heart rate to shoot to 170 beats per minute, the equivalent of doing a good jog.

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