Mayo Clinic doctor explains what is known about 'post-Covid syndrome'

we know that the symptoms that come along with covid aren't fun many experience a bad cough or a fever however some coveted patients are experiencing long-term effects even after contracting the virus and long after they should be clear of it it's impacting their ability to go back to work joining us right now to discuss more about this is dr greg vanishkikorn he is occupational medical specialist at the mayo clinic and dr van it's good to see you this morning this is something that's been talked about but really hasn't been focused on how many people have the long-standing impact that comes with kova that lasts longer than the three or four weeks you would think it would take to clear this up yeah thank you so much for having me this morning you know at this point it's a little bit too early to accurately estimate about how many people will be coming down with post-covet syndrome and the reason for this is that the research out there has looked at pretty specialized populations and because of that the results have been very varied so for example a study in italy looked at patients and almost 80 percent of those patients were still suffering symptoms about two months after their acute infection yet another study in london looked at patients and found that only about 10 of those were suffering from continued symptoms about a month afterwards but what i can say at this point and i feel confident of this is that post-covet syndrome the long-haul scenario is not something that is rare and patients providers and employers should be expecting to see this in their communities what what what are the long-term impacts can you describe it and i guess part of it because it's not necessarily an easy thing to catalog or to to say exactly what it is that could explain some of the difference between the 10 percent or the 25 percent but how severe are these symptoms what should people expect unfortunately they can be quite severe there are three main symptoms that we most often hear about from patients the first and most common being fatigue and it's not just like any fatigue like you know fatigue that we get from a bad night of sleep but rather profound fatigue so for example patients will say that doing something as simple as taking a dog for a walk going up a flight of steps at their home can often result in them you need to excuse me take a nap or rest for several hours afterwards the other symptom that we hear a lot about is something called brain fog and that is manifest with difficulties in short-term memory concentration and also difficulties with multitasking and finally the most common the third most common symptom that we see is shortness of breath and cough and that actually seems to occur both with rest and activity so doctor i'm just wondering uh what your thinking is on on the the actual uh underlying causes for these things i mean does the initial uh onset of the virus as a scourge to the body leave lasting scars on different organs or different parts of the body or is there an autoimmune response that we're seeing that seems to continue even after you've completely cleared the virus there is a lot of research going on to this and we're trying to uncover what the true ideology is of the condition i don't believe that this is related to an ongoing acute covet infection but rather the sequelae from the infection initially our current hypotheses include things such as alterations in blood flow especially to the brain as well as possibly an autoimmune state like you mentioned or some increased inflammation for a longer period of time after the acute infection but something that we're looking at closely and just starting to excuse me scratch the surface on do you think doctor that this is something that is impacted based on different genetic makeups for people is it something that if you get different treatments if you receive a treatment earlier and maybe it stops the virus before it continues to replicate what are your guesses on that well at this point i can't say that there's a genetic basis for the differences in the outcomes we of course have seen patients who have had more severe cases of covid like those patients being in the icu or in the hospital or patients of advanced age be more likely to come down with post covert syndrome but i think one of the real startling things about this is that those kinds of patients you know hospitalized patients or the elderly don't make up the majority of the patients that we have been seeing in fact many of the patients that we are seeing are younger in age and are quite healthy and physically fit before their covet infection so unfortunately it does seem like this is something that anybody can come down with after their infection doctor i think there were similar things seen with mers and solar so i'm wondering if it's specific to this type of respiratory virus because there's a lot of viruses where once it's gone it's completely gone so can you get clues from from those other uh you know we've seen epidemic not quite like this but we've seen some epidemics in the past where you can test those patients years after being exposed is it similar and any clues similar yes unfortunately or unfortunately depending on how you want to look at it we did see this previously with the sars and mers outbreaks back in 2003 but of course to a much smaller scale so didn't quite make headway and medicine then but we have learned from from our experiences with those patients about the treatments and again that's where we saw patients who have more advanced age and severe illness acutely get post-covert syndrome this does have some similarities with other viruses such as mononucleosis or mono as we all know it but it's not a trait that we see for viruses across the board for example this is not something that we have seen with the common cold or influenza are there uh other institutions like better than the mayo clinic looking at this doctor i mean i'd like i think we really ought to no i'm kidding uh so if the mayo clinic can't figure it out i think we we got i think we got problems um but it's there's a how much research would you say is that a lot of research is basic science this seems really applied and it seems like something that should be funded and going on at a lot of different places is it yes absolutely so initially postcovet syndrome just because we saw cases initially on the east coast of covid postcovet syndrome treatment started there on the east coast i believe there's a great center at mount sinai for example that is doing a lot of these treatments and the research is is quickly building up starting as you have alluded to mainly with just trying to figure out who these patients are and what kind of characteristics they're developing we've been a little bit uh held back by the fact that not many people recognized post covenant syndrome for a while and now that this is becoming more apparent more and more research efforts are developing and hopefully funding will follow with that as well shepard smith here thanks for watching cnbc on youtube

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Length: 7min 9sec (429 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020