Who Gets Long Covid, and Why? | Huge Findings From New Study

whether it's your blood type pre-existing conditions or even your race there's been great debate about what makes you more likely to catch covid and how badly but what about the brutal long tail affecting what recent studies show could be up to one in five cases why might you be knocked out for months and months whilst your buddy recovers in mere weeks well i've done a study that might just throw some light on that let's go through it [Music] the risk factors for acute covid were well publicized early in the pandemic advanced age obviously a big one but then pre-existing conditions such as diabetes hypertension cancer lung kidney or heart disease all seemed to raise the risk but as time ticked along we realized that those struck down with long covered weren't the same cohorts as those struck with a severe acute covid they're young fit and healthy uh in my case i mean i might not be that young anymore but i was probably the fittest i'd ever been i was training for my fourth marathon and running uh 90 kilometers a week when i first got symptoms i've done recent studies where i've looked at the age and activity breakdowns for long covered sufferers and there's absolutely no correlation with age and if anything they're more active than a cross-section of the population at large i've also investigated blood type and largely my results tallied with some of the other studies out there for acute covid higher prevalence of a and a b lower prevalence of o but that correlation with the acute coded studies suggests this just reflects your chances of catching covid in the first place rather than going on to develop the long-haul symptoms so why do some people get to week two of covert and get better whilst others find themselves facing months and months of debilitating illness well let's jump back into the pathophysiology what havoc is this virus wreaking in our bodies [Music] in previous films i've talked about the complexity of the condition or potentially conditions that constitute long covid where no two sufferers have quite the same experience why is this well there are three theories currently still circulating about what's causing the problems and the first of those is viral persistence basically there's still some sars cov2 uh hiding away in our body causing problems and with the vascular nature of the disease this could be pretty much anywhere so the big question in terms of testing for this is where are you going to look for it and it's going to be incredibly invasive in terms of the tissue sampling needed the second theory is that there is still inactive virus residing in the body and the immune system is reacting against that genetic material with significant collateral damage the third is that the virus itself is long gone but the immune system has got stuck in an overreactive high gear and it's that degree of autoimmunity that's creating the range of symptoms we're seeing in addition to these three theories there's also uh the evidence that suggests that the virus can affect the hypothalamus which is responsible for managing many of the body's regulatory processes now coronaviruses aren't known for viral persistence so in theory this should seem like an unlikely scenario but sars kovi 2 is a pesky little blighter and so far many of our assumptions about how it should behave haven't necessarily been carried through into what we're seeing with the evidence so i wouldn't really want to rule this out and i think one of the prime areas for research would be to either establish or eliminate this theory my personal feeling is that whether or not viral persistence can happen it's not really responsible for the majority of cases of long covid what i think we're seeing is in fact incredibly complex overreactive immune cascade that's responsible for the majority of symptoms that long haulers experience so why do some people experience this and not others is there a way of predicting who's likely to develop long covert after an initial covert infection [Music] my hypothesis was that certain immune disorders might make the development of long covid more likely and we don't necessarily think of these conditions as being necessarily immune disorders the first is atp that is the grouping of conditions of hay fever asthma and eczema if you experience one of these you are more likely to experience one of the others these conditions are typically associated with heightened immune responses and my theory is that they would also be associated thus with long covid another immune related condition is type 1 diabetes where the body's immune system attacks and destroys the cells that produce insulin would this be seen disproportionately amongst long haulers and what about another common autoimmune issue rheumatoid arthritis it's not just a condition for old people young and middle-aged people suffer too would this be disproportionately represented my theory was that if you've already got an immune system that's slightly trigger happy you're going to find that trigger well and truly pressed by the covert juggernaut and even if these conditions weren't predictors of long covid would the autoimmune inflammation that comes with long covid make these conditions worse well let's have a look at the data [Music] i conducted a study of 824 long-haulers drawn from support groups on facebook and the body politic group on slack the majority was from the uk with 26 from the us and 14 from europe and around the world if you've seen my research before you probably boarded these caveats but they are important the sample was both self-selecting and self-reporting and the demographic was largely a representation of the use of the social media platforms involved but again this shouldn't have too much of an impact on this particular type of data we're looking at here so let's look at the first breakdown age i used a different categorization this time around than on previous studies showing that the most numerous group was in their 40s but again a broad range here more people in their 20s than their 70s and this middle-aged bulge most likely due to facebook use if snapchat identified long-covered sufferers and i drew my data from there this would probably look rather different now in the population at large what percentage of people are atopic that is to say suffer from one or more of asthma eczema or hay fever well frustratingly data for the uk and the us is rather hard to come by we know about 20 experience hay fever in western populations five to ten percent experienced expert in the uk and to get the atopic asthma prevalence we have to do some quick maths 5.4 million in the uk is 8.3 percent of which 37 are a topic so 3 overall now these groups aren't all exclusive so the total number of atopic sufferers would be less than the sum of these individual categories which reference comes out at 30.5 percent if you search for eight appears up whole group the statistics are harder to find we've got the us in 1964 to around 20 in canada in 2014 it was 19.4 percent so let's try and be a bit more accurate with that 30.5 figure that's a straight addition of the three conditions how many of my atopic sample had more than one of these conditions 42 percent so that's 42 you can't count twice regressive maths using my sample as a model tells us that our expected atopic percentage of the population is 72.7 times 30.5 which is 22.2 percent so basically if there was no correlation between a to p and the probability of developing long covid then we'd expect to see the proportion of my sample reporting either hay fever eczema or asthma as 22.2 percent and how many of our long-haulers actually did 473 or 57.4 percent this is massive way beyond the margin of error and 157 percent higher than we'd expect but wait you say you're picking up some asthmatics who aren't a topic well yes but we can compensate for that because we know 38 percent of asthmatics are so we can eliminate the non-atopics and we're still looking at 52.8 percent against that expected 22.2 percent still a huge result right next type 1 diabetes not so common 2.6 million people in the uk have diabetes of either type 1 in 10 of those have type 1 so that's 0.4 percent in the general population and in this study of longhaulis how many had type 1 diabetes well 0.4 percent so moving along nothing to see here now rheumatoid arthritis for once there's a study saying just what i need the occurrence of rheumatoid arthritis does not vary among people of northern european origin whether living in europe or north america so this sample looks sound extrapolated to the population of the uk the overall minimum prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis is 1.16 in women and 0.44 in men interesting here that this autoimmune condition is more prevalent than women this also matches both mine and other data samples too which have shown that long covert is anywhere between two to one and five to one times more prevalent in women than men right now we don't actually have a clear idea on why this might be across the sexes the prevalence here overall is 0.9 percent so what are we going to see amongst this cohort of long haulers place your bets and the answer is 14 this puts the atp results in the shade one thousand five hundred percent higher than we'd expect and were they all really old no the spread of instance here is largely a reflection of the age groups present in the sample slight bias towards the older groups as you can see in this normalized chart here this 14 incidence is really quite a significant result we've got one more category left and that is post viral fatigue how many of our sample had previously experienced it well we've got some more sums to do here again unfortunately annual incidence per 100 000 people was 12.2 in 2017. now if we assume the average age of this sample is 45 postal fatigue is really only diagnosed in adulthood but let's say the average person in this group has had 35 years to appear in this kind of statistic this gives us a prevalence in the population for people who have at some point experienced post-war fatigue of 0.4 percent and how many of our long haulers have previously experienced post trial fatigue uh you said uh 0.4 percent our survey said 23 another absolute whopper here it's worth pointing out the quoted statistics are for diagnosed post viral fatigue and this probably under represents the true incidence of it but still not by 62 and a half times this result is 6 000 percent higher than we'd expect i'm going to come back to all of these results shortly but let's have a quick look at what happens if you've got one of these conditions and then you catch longcovid does your atp or your arthritis does it get worse or better well what do you think well it doesn't make it better asthma being the most commonly reported condition made worse by long covid with just over half reporting at least one or more of these conditions having worsened and what about rheumatoid arthritis is that strong correlation carried over into a scenario where the autoimmune inflammation makes the condition worse absolutely the vast majority here says it's either got slightly worse or much worse and there's a number more people who didn't have arthritis symptoms before but do now so what's going on the incredibly high prevalence of not just atp but rheumatoid arthritis and prior post-viral fatigue gives us more evidence should it be needed that an inflammatory autoimmune response is at the core of the long covered experience whether or not there's still viral persistence is hard to know but it's certainly not necessary to deliver the vast range of symptoms that we see in lancovid covered dysautonomia pots and mast cell activation syndrome many long-covered sufferers are experiencing symptoms compatible with these conditions as well as the systemic inflammation responsible in part for things like tachycardia and palpitations respiratory issues and skin issues and the root with all of this really is in the immune system only recently we've seen some research findings that show high level of auto antibodies which back this up giving more credence to the anti-serotonin antibody persistence theory i've spoken about before now this one does make a lot of sense to me and it pretty much explains most of my symptoms from fatigue to insomnia low mood and brain fog the subsequent breakdown of mast cells to compensate uh creating histamine release inflammation and skin issues but my experience isn't everyone's and there really is a lucky dip of symptoms uh with the long covered experience what we are seeing though with these results is that the presence of certain immune or allergic conditions drastically increases your probability of developing long covid after an initial covert infection and if you've not had covert yet but have previously had post viral fatigue well wear a mask a visor and probably a hazmat suit too not only are these results predictive but they're also illustrative of what the condition actually is so this is incredibly fertile ground for future research and trying to understand the mechanism of disease i can only hope the research comes quickly not just for those suffering with long covert now but for those catching the infection in this wave we're seeing at the moment because the numbers globally aren't going to be huge and before we can start to rehabilitate people or potentially treat the condition we need to know what the hell it's actually doing so look after yourselves until next time [Music] you

Channel: Gez Medinger

Views: 349,266

Keywords: coivd, coronavirus, corona, virus, pandemic, plandemic, vaccine

Id: hnPvw20iH80

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020