- Brain imaging and neuropsychological assessment of individuals recovered from a mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pnas.org
- An mRNA-based T-cell-inducing antigen strengthens COVID-19 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 variants Nature.com
- Endemic SARS-CoV-2 Demonstrating Workforce/Health Consequences Infection Control Today
- Evolutionary characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants adapted to the host | Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy Nature.com
- Disinfection of SARS-CoV-2 by UV-LED 267 nm: comparing different variants | Scientific Reports Nature.com
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Most ‘long COVID’ symptoms after mild case of virus resolve in about a year: new study
Most people with “long COVID” following a mild case of the COVID-19 virus have their symptoms resolve after a year, according to a new study out of Israel.
“Long COVID” is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the long-term effects of a COVID infection, according to the agency’s website.
The study, published on Jan. 11, 2023, in The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical trade journal, examined 1,913,234 patient records from the Israeli HMO Maccabi Healthcare Services.
COVID OMICRON SUBVARIANT XBB: WHY THE NUMBER OF CASES IS LIKELY FAR GREATER THAN REPORTED
The nearly 2 million patients were all tested for COVID-19 during the period between March 2020 and October 2021.
About 300,000 of those patients tested positive for the coronavirus. The researchers then compared those patients to similar patients who did not test positive for the virus.
A member of the Salt Lake County Health Department COVID-19 testing staff performs a nasal swab test on a patient outside the Salt Lake County Health Department on Jan. 4, 2022, in Salt Lake City.
(Associated Press/Rick Bowmer)
The study’s authors created a list of 70 “long COVID” symptoms and looked into patient records to see if those symptoms persisted after a coronavirus diagnosis.
Anyone who was hospitalized for COVID-19 was excluded from the study, as it was deemed they did not have a “mild” case of the virus.
NEW COVID OMICRON SUBVARIANT XBB.1.5 IS ‘SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE’ IN US: HEALTH EXPERTS REVEAL WHY
“We wanted to truly understand what are the long-term effects of this infection on the majority of the population and whether we should expect a significant burden on health care providers,” senior author Maytal Bivas-Benita and lead author Barak Mizrahi said in a joint email to the health news site STAT.
The study’s results were unexpected, said Bivas-Benita and Mizrahi.
“My real concern is that long COVID may go up with recurrent infection.”
“As we analyzed the data, we were surprised to find only a small number of symptoms that were related to COVID and remained for a year post-infection, and the low number of people affected by them,” the authors told STAT.
Most people who experienced post-COVID symptoms saw those symptoms clear up within a year, said the newly published study.
(iStock)
Those who had mild cases of COVID-19, the study found, had an increased risk of a variety of health problems.
Those problems included the loss of smell and taste, difficulties with memory and concentration, breathing difficulties, weakness, strep throat and heart palpitations.
Women in particular had a higher risk of hair loss, said the study.
HEALTHY AGING AND DRINKING WATER: FASCINATING FINDINGS FROM A NEW STUDY
For most of these people, however, these symptoms were gone within a year of their having COVID-19, said the study.
Dr. Mark Siegel, a Fox News medical contributor, clinical professor of medicine and practicing internist at NYU Langone Medical Center, told Fox News Digital that he was not overly surprised by the findings of the study.
“I see a lot of ‘post-COVID’ and I watch it — and hope it goes away.”
“There’s a distinction between ‘post-COVID’ and ‘long-COVID,’” said Dr. Siegel. “So this study just reinforces that [difference] — that most of the time, the symptoms go away.”
“I see a lot of ‘post-COVID’ and I watch it — and hope it goes away. We don’t really have a good treatment for it,” he added.
The Israeli study examined nearly two million people in Israel who were tested for COVID-19.
(Getty Images)
The findings of the Israeli study run counter to another study stating that mild symptoms of COVID correlated with long COVID, said Siegel.
He “didn’t buy” the results of that study, said Dr. Siegel — and it was not what he experienced.
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“The orthodoxy on this is that severe COVID leads to long COVID,” he said.
Another issue, he explained, is that the coronavirus pandemic “is still evolving” and that more research needs to be done — and that the term “long COVID” is still in need of a universal definition.
For Siegel, “long COVID” is “any symptom I can pin to COVID that lasts beyond six months.”
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What is most worrying, said Siegel, “is that repetitive infection increases the risk of long COVID. We’re now in the phase where that’s occurring.”
He also said, “My real concern is that long COVID may go up with recurrent infection.”
Long-term symptoms from mild Covid resolve within year, study says
CNN
—
The majority of long Covid symptoms resolve within the first year after infection for people with mild cases of Covid-19, according to a large study conducted in Israel.
“Mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long term morbidity in the vast majority of patients,” said study coauthor Barak Mizrahi, a senior researcher at KI Research Institute in Kfar Malal, via email.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ, compared thousands of vaccinated and unvaccinated people with mild Covid symptoms who were not hospitalized with people who tested negative for the virus. Long Covid was defined as symptoms that continue or appear more than four weeks after an initial Covid-19 infection.
“I think this study is reassuring in that most ongoing symptoms following COVID do improve over the first several months following the acute infection,” said Dr. Benjamin Abramoff, director of the Penn Medicine Post-COVID Assessment and Recovery Clinic, via email. He was not involved in the study.
But not for everyone. Abramoff said his clinic continues to see many patients with severe long Covid symptoms lasting longer than one year following their infection.
“This is particularly true in those individuals who had severe persistent symptoms early after their acute infection,” said Abramoff, who leads the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation’s long Covid collaborative.
Dr. Jonathan Whiteson, an associate professor of rehabilitation medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, sees the same in his clinic.
“I continue to see many patients from the ‘first wave’ of COVID who had mild to moderate acute COVID (and were) never hospitalized who have significant persistent and functionally limiting symptoms nearly 3 years later,” said Whiteson via email. He was not involved with the study.
Israeli researchers analyzed the medical records of nearly 300,000 people diagnosed with mild cases of Covid-19 and compared their health over the next year with approximately 300,000 people who didn’t have Covid. The average age of those who tested positive for Covid was 25 years, and 51% were female.
Researchers looked for 65 conditions that have been associated with long Covid and divided those into two time frames: early, or the first 30 to 180 days after catching Covid; and late, or 180 to 360 days post infection.
After controlling for age, sex, alcohol and tobacco use, preexisting conditions, and the different variants of Covid-19, researchers found a significant risk of brain fog, loss of smell and taste, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, and strep throat in both the early and late time periods.
Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain, and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, according to the researchers.
Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint, the study found. Being vaccinated reduced the risk of respiratory issues, but researchers found vaccinated individuals had a “similar risk for other outcomes compared with unvaccinated infected patients,” according to the study.
“Because of the study’s size, it was possible to look at the change in symptom prevalence over time and the effects of other factors on persistent symptoms,” said Dr. Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, in a statement.
“Smell disorder typically resolved at about 9 months, but when they were present concentration and memory changes tended to be more persistent,” said Openshaw, who was not involved in the study.
Only slight differences appeared between men and women in the study, but children had fewer early symptoms than adults, which were mostly gone by year’s end. No real differences were found between the original wild-type of SARS-CoV-2 (March 2020 to November 2020), the Alpha variant (January 2021 to April 2021) and the Delta variant (July 2021 to October 2021).
“Patients with mild Covid-19 had an increased risk for a small number of health outcomes, with only a few symptoms persisting a year from SARS-CoV-2 infection and their risk decreased with time from infection,” Mizrahi said via email.
However, “we are not claiming there are no patients who suffer from long COVID symptoms like dyspnea (difficulty breathing), weakness, cognitive impairment etc.,” he added. “(Our study) does not contradict evidence that a small number of patients do suffer from long lasting symptoms as seen in this analysis.”
Researchers pointed to certain limitations in the study, such as the possibility of diagnostic errors or failure to record some milder symptoms over time. Abramoff agreed.
“This design of this study is not able to detect the severity of these symptoms, and there are potentially other missed patients due to using medical coding to detect persistent Long COVID symptoms,” Abramoff said.
It could also be difficult to apply the findings of the study to other countries, such as the United States, due to differences in how doctors code symptoms. For example, the study did not identify several conditions frequently found in long Covid clinics in the US, said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the department of rehabilitation medicine at the Long School of Medicine at UT Health, San Antonio.
“The most common symptom of Long COVID is fatigue, and that was not on this list. Also missing was post-exertional malaise, dysautonomia/POTS, or ME/CFS. These are some of the major presentations I am seeing in my clinic population, so it is a major limitation of this study to not have those outcomes,” said Verduzco-Gutierrez, who was not involved in the new study.
Post-exertional malaise is an overwhelming exhaustion after even a minimal amount of effort. Unlike regular exhaustion, it can take days to weeks for a person to recover, and the malaise can be reactivated if activity is resumed too quickly.
Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, is a bump in heart rate after sitting up or standing that can lead to dizziness or fainting. It’s a form of dysautonomia, a disorder of the autonomic nervous system. “There is usually no cure for dysautonomia,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, is a serious long-term illness, in which people have overwhelming fatigue that is not improved by rest. The condition can impact sleep and thinking processes, cause pain in many parts of the body, and keep people from doing most daily activities.
Responding to this concern, Mizrahi told CNN that “post exertional malaise was not included in this study as it is not a diagnosis that commonly prescribed in Israel.” In addition, he said, dysautonomia/POTS was only assigned an International Classification of Diseases, or ICD medical code, as of October 2022, so it too was not included in the study.
However, symptoms of POTS and other conditions may have been included under more general categories such as cardiac arrhythmias or palpitations, he said.
In addition, Mizrahi said fatigue was coded under “weakness” in the study. In fact, researchers found weakness to be the second most common symptom reported in the study, and it continued to plague people ages 19 to 60, for months.
Long COVID Stemmed From Mild Cases Of COVID-19 In Most People, According To A New Multicountry Study
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Even mild COVID-19 cases can have major and long-lasting effects on people’s health. That is one of the key findings from our recent multicountry study on long COVID-19 — or long COVID — recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Long COVID is defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These symptoms last for at least two months after onset with no other explanation.
We found that a staggering 90% of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive problems such as brain fog — or a combination of these — that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children for developing long COVID.
We analyzed data from 54 studies reporting on over 1 million people from 22 countries who had experienced symptoms of COVID-19. We counted how many people with COVID-19 developed clusters of new long-COVID symptoms and determined how their risk of developing the disease varied based on their age, sex and whether they were hospitalized for COVID-19.
We found that patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a greater risk of developing long COVID — and of having longer-lasting symptoms — compared with people who had not been hospitalized. However, because the vast majority of COVID-19 cases do not require hospitalization, many more cases of long COVID have arisen from these milder cases despite their lower risk. Among all people with long COVID, our study found that nearly one out of every seven were still experiencing these symptoms a year later, and researchers don’t yet know how many of these cases may become chronic. https://www.youtube.com/embed/e0REUL7pniU?wmode=transparent&start=0 Long COVID can affect nearly any organ in the body.
Why it matters
Compared with COVID-19, relatively little is known about long COVID.
Our systematic, multicountry analysis of this condition delivered findings that illuminate the potentially steep human and economic costs of long COVID around the world. Many people who are living with the condition are working-age adults. Being unable to work for many months could cause people to lose their income, their livelihoods and their housing. For parents or caregivers living with long COVID, the condition may make them unable to care for their loved ones.
We think, based on the pervasiveness and severity of long COVID, that it is keeping people from working and therefore contributing to labor shortages. Long COVID could also be a factor in how people losing their jobs has disproportionately affected women.
We believe that finding effective and affordable treatments for people living with long COVID should be a priority for researchers and research funders. Long COVID clinics have opened to provide specialized care, but the treatments they offer are limited, inconsistent and may be costly.
What’s next
Long COVID is a complex and dynamic condition — some symptoms disappear, then return, and new symptoms appear. But researchers don’t yet know why.
While our study focused on the three most common symptoms associated with long COVID that affect daily functioning, the condition can also include symptoms like loss of smell and taste, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems and headaches, among others. But in most cases these additional symptoms occur together with the main symptoms we made estimates for.
There are many unanswered questions about what predisposes people to long COVID. For example, how do different risk factors, including smoking and high body-mass index, influence people’s likelihood of developing the condition? Does getting reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 change the risk for long COVID? Also, it is unclear how protection against long COVID changes over time after a person has been vaccinated or boosted against COVID-19.
COVID-19 variants also present new puzzles. Researchers know that the omicron variant is less deadly than previous strains. Initial evidence shows lower risk of long COVID from omicron compared with earlier strains, but far more data is needed.
Most of the people we studied were infected with the deadlier variants that were circulating before omicron became dominant. We will continue to build on our research on long COVID as part of the Global Burden of Disease study — which makes estimates of deaths and disability due to all diseases and injuries in every country in the world — in order to to get a clearer picture of how COVID-19’s long-term toll shifted once omicron arrived.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Most people who ended up with long COVID started with a mild case, new study shows
Sarah Wulf Hanson is the lead research scientist of Global Health Metrics at the University of Washington and Theo Vos is a professor of health metric sciences with the University of Washington.
The big idea
Even mild COVID-19 cases can have major and long-lasting effects on people’s health. That is one of the key findings from our recent multicountry study on long COVID-19 – or long COVID – recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Long COVID is defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These symptoms last for at least two months after onset with no other explanation.
We found that a staggering 90% of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive problems such as brain fog – or a combination of these – that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children for developing long COVID.
We analyzed data from 54 studies reporting on over 1 million people from 22 countries who had experienced symptoms of COVID-19. We counted how many people with COVID-19 developed clusters of new long-COVID symptoms and determined how their risk of developing the disease varied based on their age, sex and whether they were hospitalized for COVID-19.
We found that patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a greater risk of developing long COVID – and of having longer-lasting symptoms – compared with people who had not been hospitalized. However, because the vast majority of COVID-19 cases do not require hospitalization, many more cases of long COVID have arisen from these milder cases despite their lower risk. Among all people with long COVID, our study found that nearly one out of every seven were still experiencing these symptoms a year later, and researchers don’t yet know how many of these cases may become chronic.
Why it matters
Compared with COVID-19, relatively little is known about long COVID.
Our systematic, multicountry analysis of this condition delivered findings that illuminate the potentially steep human and economic costs of long COVID around the world. Many people who are living with the condition are working-age adults. Being unable to work for many months could cause people to lose their income, their livelihoods and their housing. For parents or caregivers living with long COVID, the condition may make them unable to care for their loved ones.
We think, based on the pervasiveness and severity of long COVID, that it is keeping people from working and therefore contributing to labor shortages. Long COVID could also be a factor in how people losing their jobs has disproportionately affected women.
We believe that finding effective and affordable treatments for people living with long COVID should be a priority for researchers and research funders. Long COVID clinics have opened to provide specialized care, but the treatments they offer are limited, inconsistent and may be costly.
What’s next
Long COVID is a complex and dynamic condition – some symptoms disappear, then return, and new symptoms appear. But researchers don’t yet know why.
While our study focused on the three most common symptoms associated with long COVID that affect daily functioning, the condition can also include symptoms like loss of smell and taste, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems and headaches, among others. But in most cases these additional symptoms occur together with the main symptoms we made estimates for.
There are many unanswered questions about what predisposes people to long COVID. For example, how do different risk factors, including smoking and high body-mass index, influence people’s likelihood of developing the condition? Does getting reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 change the risk for long COVID? Also, it is unclear how protection against long COVID changes over time after a person has been vaccinated or boosted against COVID-19.
COVID-19 variants also present new puzzles. Researchers know that the Omicron variant is less deadly than previous strains. Initial evidence shows lower risk of long COVID from Omicron compared with earlier strains, but far more data is needed.
Most of the people we studied were infected with the deadlier variants that were circulating before omicron became dominant. We will continue to build on our research on long COVID as part of the Global Burden of Disease study – which makes estimates of deaths and disability due to all diseases and injuries in every country in the world – in order to to get a clearer picture of how COVID-19’s long-term toll shifted once omicron arrived.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Long COVID stemmed from mild cases of COVID-19 in most people
Enlarge / Symptoms of long COVID-19 include fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive issues.
Getty Images / ArtistGNDphotography
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Even mild COVID-19 cases can have major and long-lasting effects on people’s health. That is one of the key findings from our recent multicountry study on long COVID-19—or long COVID—recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Long COVID is defined as the continuation or development of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These symptoms last for at least two months after onset with no other explanation.
We found that a staggering 90 percent of people living with long COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long COVID, however, the typical person experienced symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath, and cognitive problems such as brain fog—or a combination of these—that affected daily functioning. These symptoms had an impact on health as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children for developing long COVID.
We analyzed data from 54 studies reporting on over 1 million people from 22 countries who had experienced symptoms of COVID-19. We counted how many people with COVID-19 developed clusters of new long-COVID symptoms and determined how their risk of developing the disease varied based on their age, sex, and whether they were hospitalized for COVID-19.
We found that patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a greater risk of developing long COVID—and of having longer-lasting symptoms—compared with people who had not been hospitalized. However, because the vast majority of COVID-19 cases do not require hospitalization, many more cases of long COVID have arisen from these milder cases despite their lower risk. Among all people with long COVID, our study found that nearly one out of every seven were still experiencing these symptoms a year later, and researchers don’t yet know how many of these cases may become chronic.
Long COVID can affect nearly any organ in the body.
Why it matters
Compared with COVID-19, relatively little is known about long COVID.
Our systematic, multicountry analysis of this condition delivered findings that illuminate the potentially steep human and economic costs of long COVID around the world. Many people who are living with the condition are working-age adults. Being unable to work for many months could cause people to lose their income, their livelihoods, and their housing. For parents or caregivers living with long COVID, the condition may make them unable to care for their loved ones.
We think, based on the pervasiveness and severity of long COVID, that it is keeping people from working and therefore contributing to labor shortages. Long COVID could also be a factor in how people losing their jobs has disproportionately affected women.
We believe that finding effective and affordable treatments for people living with long COVID should be a priority for researchers and research funders. Long COVID clinics have opened to provide specialized care, but the treatments they offer are limited, inconsistent, and may be costly.
What’s next
Long COVID is a complex and dynamic condition—some symptoms disappear, then return, and new symptoms appear. But researchers don’t yet know why.
While our study focused on the three most common symptoms associated with long COVID that affect daily functioning, the condition can also include symptoms like loss of smell and taste, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems, and headaches, among others. But in most cases these additional symptoms occur together with the main symptoms we made estimates for.
There are many unanswered questions about what predisposes people to long COVID. For example, how do different risk factors, including smoking and high body-mass index, influence people’s likelihood of developing the condition? Does getting reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 change the risk for long COVID? Also, it is unclear how protection against long COVID changes over time after a person has been vaccinated or boosted against COVID-19.
COVID-19 variants also present new puzzles. Researchers know that the omicron variant is less deadly than previous strains. Initial evidence shows lower risk of long COVID from omicron compared with earlier strains, but far more data is needed.
Most of the people we studied were infected with the deadlier variants that were circulating before omicron became dominant. We will continue to build on our research on long COVID as part of the Global Burden of Disease study—which makes estimates of deaths and disability due to all diseases and injuries in every country in the world—in order to get a clearer picture of how COVID-19’s long-term toll shifted once omicron arrived.
Sarah Wulf Hanson is lead research scientist of Global Health Metrics, University of Washington and Theo Vos is professor of health metric sciences, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
What you should know about strep A, the usually mild infection killing kids in the U.K.
Health agencies are issuing warnings to parents about invasive group A streptococcus (iGAS), a common bacterium that usually causes mild illness but can sometimes result in severe cases and even death in young children.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is “looking into a possible increase” in iGAS infections among children in the U.S., and on Monday the World Health Organization said a number of European countries have reported an increase in iGAS disease among children under 10 years old.
In France and the United Kingdom, the number of iGAS cases observed in children “has been several-fold higher than pre-pandemic levels for the equivalent period of time,” the WHO said.
Earlier this month, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said the U.K. is experiencing “an out of season increase” in strep A infections. Since September, 85 iGAS cases have been reported in children ages 1 to 4 years old throughout the U.K., and in England 13 children under the age of 18 have died.
What is strep A?
Strep A is responsible for a number of different infections, including scarlet fever and common illnesses like strep throat. It spreads easily through contact with an infected person or exposure to respiratory droplets after an infected person sneezes or coughs.
Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University, told Yahoo News that strep A infections are usually mild and often involve symptoms such as a sore throat or localized skin rash. But, very rarely, strep A can become more invasive, entering the bloodstream and causing severe illness or death.
“The mild skin infections and sore throats are not considered invasive because they’re superficial to the surface of the mucosa in the throat or the surface of the skin,” El-Sadr said. “But once you get a deeper infection, then it can be quite serious. For example, dissemination into the bloodstream could also cause pneumonia sometimes in some people. So anything beyond the surface of the upper respiratory tract and surface of the skin is considered invasive, and that usually means that it’s more severe.”
The CDC says infections stemming from iGAS include necrotizing fasciitis and streptococcal toxic shock syndrome — two rare, invasive bacterial infections that spread swiftly through the body and can result in death. Unlike a typical strep A infection, an iGAS infection is indicated by signs including high fever, confusion, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting and a rash that spreads to the entire body, with the illness quickly worsening soon after symptoms appear.
While anyone can be susceptible, iGAS is usually found in young children, adults over 65 years old and immunocompromised people. Still, UKHSA deputy director Colin Brown said in a statement that while an increase in cases may be “concerning for parents,” iGAS “remains very uncommon.”
Why is there a possible uptick in iGAS cases?
UKHSA said last week that it’s investigating the increase in iGAS cases in children, but that “currently, there is no evidence that a new strain is circulating.”
“The increase is most likely related to high amounts of circulating bacteria,” the agency said. “It isn’t possible to say for certain what is causing higher than usual rates of these infections. There is likely a combination of factors, including increased social mixing compared to the previous years as well as increases in other respiratory viruses.”
Respiratory viruses such as RSV, influenza and COVID-19 have been wreaking havoc on health care systems since September. El-Sadr explained that while it’s hard to pinpoint a reason for a possible uptick in iGAS cases, the respiratory viruses currently circulating can weaken the body’s defenses — making it easier for bacteria like strep A to penetrate and cause severe illness like iGAS.
“The hypothesis is that when you get influenza, the virus can then compromise the various layers of the respiratory tract that are protective, and that makes the individual more susceptible,” she said. “Then, if they’re exposed to [strep A], it can then move on to causing an iGAS infection.”
What should you do if you think your child has strep A?
If you or your child is experiencing strep A symptoms, you should visit your health care provider or an urgent care center to do a rapid test, which can determine if strep A is the culprit. If you receive a positive test result, your doctor will prescribe antibiotics, and you should begin to feel better within a day or two of starting treatment.
If you think you or your child may have iGAS, El-Sadr said you should seek medical attention immediately. But she reiterated that in general parents don’t need to panic.
“It’s very rare,” she said of iGAS. “And I think that’s why it’s important to put this in perspective. The vast majority of people have the milder manifestations of [strep A] that are easily treatable with antibiotics.”
What can you do to protect your kid?
There is no vaccine for strep A, but the WHO notes that coinfection of viruses with strep A “may increase the risk of iGAS disease,” so it’s important to make sure your child gets the seasonal flu vaccine.
“People often think influenza vaccination is just to prevent severe influenza, but it also can prevent potential severe consequences of [other] infections,” El-Sadr said.
She said it’s also important to return to some of the measures used early in the COVID-19 pandemic that were effective at preventing illness, such as washing your hands, keeping your hands away from your face and mouth and staying home when you’re sick. Some health experts in the U.K. are also encouraging the use of face masks to reduce transmission of strep A by respiratory droplets.
“We can remind everybody the mantra from COVID: If you’re sick, don’t go to work, don’t go to school, don’t go to day care. Keep your child at home,” El-Sadr said. “If all parents do this, then that will prevent transmission to others.”
Crossword puzzles may benefit people with mild cognitive impairment
While the study didn’t investigate whether crosswords benefit younger adults who are not dealing with cognitive decline, it suggests that keeping your mind active as you age may benefit your brain. And the research offers hope to those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment that they may be able to stave off further declines in the memory, language problems and decision-making that are the hallmark of the condition.
The American Academy of Neurology estimates that mild cognitive impairment affects about 8 percent of people ages 65 to 69; 10 percent of people ages 70 to 74; 15 percent of people ages 75 to 79; 25 percent of those ages 80 to 84; and about 37 percent of people 85 and older.
The research, which was funded by the National Institute on Aging, recruited 107 adults ages 55 to 95 with mild cognitive impairment. For 12 weeks, they were all asked to play one of two types of games, four times a week — spending either 30 minutes on Lumosity, a popular cognitive training platform, or 30 minutes attempting a digital crossword. After 12 weeks, the participants were reevaluated and given “booster” doses of game play six more times during the 78-week experiment.
By the end of the study, participants were given standard assessments used to measure cognitive decline, and friends and family reported on their day-to-day functioning. MRI scans also were used to measure brain volume changes.
Researchers found that in key measurements — cognitive decline scores, functional skills and brain volume changes — the regular crossword players fared better than the game players.
The finding surprised the scientists behind the study who had expected that challenging web-based brain games, which were specifically designed to boost cognitive function, would offer the most benefit.
“Our study shows fairly conclusively that in people with mild cognitive impairment, crossword puzzles beat the computerized games on multiple metrics,” said Murali Doraiswamy, a professor at Duke University and a co-author of the study. “So, if you have mild cognitive impairment, which is different from normal aging, then the recommendation would be to keep your brain active with crossword puzzles.”
People with higher degrees of cognitive impairment appeared to benefit the most from doing the crossword, which was designed to be a moderately difficult puzzle comparable to the New York Times Thursday game.
The study has limitations. Some of the participants may have just been more familiar with crosswords and that’s why they responded better to the puzzles than to Lumosity’s computer games. More years of follow-up also are needed to determine whether interventions such as crossword puzzles can “truly prevent dementia,” Doraiswamy said.
“We’ve known for almost 30, 40 years that keeping yourself mentally active is really important,” Doraiswamy said. “But we’ve not really translated that into an intervention that is a medical-grade intervention.”
D.P. Devanand, a professor at Columbia University and the lead researcher on the study, said the finding needs to be replicated in a larger study with more participants and a control group that isn’t playing any game.
“We can’t say beyond a certain point why people do better on crosswords, but it does suggest that doing crosswords helps you,” Devanand said.
Doraiswamy said he hopes future studies can build off the findings to investigate the optimal level of difficulty and time spent solving puzzles for people with mild cognitive impairment.
Some researchers remained skeptical. Zach Hambrick, a professor of cognition and neuroscience at Michigan State University, said the study doesn’t investigate why the crossword might offer more benefit than a computer game.
In 1999, Hambrick co-authored a study that found no evidence to suggest that people who solve crossword puzzles more than twice a week had less cognitive decline.
Hambrick said completing a crossword puzzle, which requires the ability to remember words and esoteric knowledge gathered through experience, tests a person’s “crystallized cognitive abilities.” He said that people with mild cognitive impairment have the most trouble with “fluid cognitive abilities” such as remembering a list of words or solving a logic problem. Crosswords don’t challenge the type of abilities associated with mild cognitive impairment, Hambrick said.
Lumos Labs, the company behind the computer games in the experiment, provided access to both the crossword puzzles and their suite of games but was not involved in the design or publication of the study. Doraiswamy is a consultant to Lumos Labs.
Laurie Ryan, the chief of clinical interventions at the National Institute on Aging, said the agency funded the research because it’s important to find treatments that reduce the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
“We’re likely going to need multiple interventions for different people,” Ryan said. “We’re trying to fund as many things as we can.”
Most researchers agree that keeping both your body and your mind active as you age probably benefits your brain. Ronald C. Petersen, the director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said that in addition to regular exercise, he recommends that patients spend time on challenging intellectual tasks such as watching a documentary or attending a lecture.
Look for activities that “bring you out of your comfort zone,” said Sylvie Belleville, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Montreal. Try out different “stimulating” tasks or increase the difficulty of a certain task over time. “If you’re very good at crossword puzzles and you keep doing only that, you’re still in your zone of comfort and you don’t adopt new strategies, new brain networks,” Belleville said.
People who had mild Covid had increased risk of blood clots: UK study
A patient receives a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) test at Sparrow Laboratories Drive-Thru Services in Lansing, Michigan, December 27, 2021.
Emily Elconin | Reuters
People who caught mild cases of Covid-19 during the first year of the pandemic had a higher risk of developing blood clots than those who were not infected, according to a large study published by British scientists this week.
Patients with mild Covid, defined as those not hospitalized, were 2.7 times more likely to develop blood clots, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal’s Heart on Monday. They were also 10 times more likely to die than people who did not have Covid.
Scientists affiliated with Queen Mary University of London followed 18,000 people who caught Covid during the first year of the pandemic and compared their health outcomes with nearly 34,000 people who didn’t contract the virus.
Participants were tracked until they developed cardiovascular disease, died or until the study ended in March 2021. Most of the study was conducted before the vaccines rolled out in the Britain in December 2020.
While people with mild Covid had an increased risk of blood clots, patients hospitalized with the virus had a significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease in general. The risk of cardiovascular disease for mild and severe cases was highest in the first 30 days after infection but continued later.
In addition, patients hospitalized with Covid were 28 times more likely to develop blood clots, 22 times more likely to suffer heart failure and17 times more likely to have a stroke, according to the study. Overall, they were over 100 times more likely to die than people who didn’t have Covid.
The scientists said their findings highlight the importance of monitoring even people who had mild Covid for cardiovascular disease over the long term.
“Our findings highlight the increased cardiovascular risk of individuals with past infection, which are likely to be greater in countries with limited access to vaccination and thus greater population exposure to COVID-19,” the authors of the study wrote.