What is deeply concerning to me is that Long COVID can affect anyone who has tested positive for COVID—from those who experienced mild symptoms to those who were severely ill. Furthermore, although you may not have Long COVID after your first COVID infection, each reinfection can substantially increase the risk of developing it.
This nationwide population-based cohort study initially identified higher risk of incident HL and SSNHL among young adults in the COVID-19 group. After IPTW, the COVID-19 groups showed 3.44-fold and 3.52-fold higher risks of HL and SSNHL, respectively, compared to the non-COVID-19 group. These associations remained significant after adjusting for metabolic profiles and lifestyle behaviors.
Hye Jun Kim, Seogsong Jeong, Kyuwoong Kim, Joon Don Lee, Yun Hwan Oh, Michelle J. Suh
And that, she says, is what most people fail to understand about long COVID: how serious it is, how much is at stake — how fast a healthy girl with boundless energy and big dreams can lose it all. "They think it's incredibly rare, or they don't understand that just because you had one 'nice' bout of COVID doesn't mean the next one isn't going to do permanent damage," Katie says. "People just underestimate it; they assume it won't happen to them and if it does, that someone will be there to help them."
The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from.
“This is really its own illness, lots of times affecting young, healthy people,” he said. “The traditional risk factors from getting sick and in the hospital with COVID are certainly different than developing long COVID.”
"This could be the next dementia or Alzheimer’s. People are getting worse because there’s so much misunderstanding around it by employers and everyone."
Until 2020, Dr Putrino worked mostly with people who had suffered stroke and traumatic brain injury — typically sudden events that result in disability and big shifts in the dynamics of patients' relationships. Now, he sees those same changes rippling through the families who visit his long COVID clinic.
Acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and PCC have been documented to have the following effects: cardiovascular, pulmonary, renal, psychologic, neurologic / cognitive, gastrointestinal, immunologic, endocrine, reproductive, genitourinary, dermatologic
But a massive new study confirms that COVID-19 — specifically, “long COVID,” which can kick in well after an initial infection — remains a significant risk even for those who had the mildest of cases.
People who endured even mild cases of covid-19 are at heightened risk two years later for lung problems, fatigue, diabetes and certain other health problems typical of long covid, according to a new study that casts fresh light on the virus’s true toll.
21% of people hospitalized with COVID-19 and 11% of those who were not hospitalized for COVID-19 developed high blood pressure, compared to 16% of people hospitalized with influenza and 4% of those not hospitalized for influenza.
(1) People can be reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, multiple times. Each time a person is infected or reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, they have a risk of developing Long COVID. (2) Living with Long COVID can be hard, especially when there are no immediate answers or solutions.
What we do know, definitively and without question, is that COVID-19 is not “just a cold,” as some right-wingers have maintained. As the Nature Reviews article notes, “SARS-CoV-2 has the capacity to damage many organ systems.”
The incidence of new seizures or epilepsy diagnoses in the 6 months after COVID-19 was low overall, but higher than in matched patients with influenza. This difference was more marked in people who were not hospitalized, highlighting the risk of epilepsy and seizures even in those with less severe infection. Children appear at particular risk of seizures and epilepsy after COVID-19 providing another motivation to prevent COVID-19 infection in pediatric populations.
Maxime Taquet, MD, PhD; Orrin Devinsky, MD, PhD; J. Helen Cross, MD, PhD; Paul J. Harrison, DM, FRCPsych; and Arjune Sen, MD, PhD
Children – even healthy teens and the very young – can have long Covid, several studies have found, and it can follow an infection that’s severe or mild.
Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems.
Hannah E. Davis, Lisa McCorkell, Julia Moore Vogel & Eric J. Topol
“It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’ve had one, so it’s OK. Now I can take off my mask, do what I like.’ It has health consequences for reinfections – higher mortality rate, higher hospitalization rates, higher risk of long term, lingering symptoms,” she says.
After SARS-CoV-2 infection, one study found evidence many of these cells had been activated and “exhausted”. This suggests the cells are dysfunctional, and might not be able to adequately fight a subsequent infection. In other words, sustained activation of these immune cells after a SARS-CoV-2 infection may have an impact on other inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Lara Herrero
Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University
Opinion: Can having Covid trigger shingles? Yes, probably, according to Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris, and you might want to think about a shingles vaccine.
Having been fit and active, I now find that on bad days I still struggle with everyday chores, and my usually quick-firing brain remains in slo-mo (“brain fog”), a far cry from the way it used to function when I was still working as a consultant in infectious diseases.
Vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID by lowering the chances of contracting COVID- 19 in the first place. But for those who do experience a breakthrough infection, studies suggest that vaccination might only halve the risk of long COVID — or have no effect on it at all.
Another consistent finding is that it does not appear to matter whether non-hospitalized patients had more severe cases of COVID-19, mild cases or even cases that caused no symptoms at all.
