A radio editor who called me asked if I could possibly respond to the news on the news station. In the General Newspaper was that one in seven corona patients is left with psychological problems and an increased risk of dementia. “I believe Erik Scherder says so.”
To start with the latter: Scherder is innocent. On the internet it had AD the whole thing garnished with a video of the brain scientist about something completely different, as a lure for the site visitor. As a result, his face now stood as a sort of signboard above the tidings of doom: ‘1 in 7 will develop psychological problems.’
What? That seems strange to me. At least three quarters of all Dutch people have now experienced a corona infection. Then two million Dutch people would be in psychological distress?
The research that prompted the article turns out to be a rather obscure British study, just published in trade magazine Molecular Psychiatry. This is not about the entire population – but about confused elderly people, and cells in a culture tray. Question that hung above the study: why do elderly people with severe corona often develop delirium?
To investigate this, the blood of eighteen hospital patients with and without delirium had been dripped onto cultured brain cells. Result: in the delirium patients the cells died more often and they grew back less well. Probably because of the substance interleukin-6, the British figured out, a panicky inflammatory protein that upsets brain cells.
Guard. The study was therefore about hospital patients. Of an average age of 76 years. In addition, 80 percent of whom have ‘two or more underlying conditions’, I read in the British tables.
But what happens next? Such a novelty gets paws. er came a press release. In which the finding was praised even more. This may have been about confused elderly people, but you never know. Previous research indicates that 20 to 30 percent of Covid patients develop neurological symptoms such as delirium. The study “may provide information on possible treatments to reduce symptoms of confusion, disorientation and memory deficits in Covid-19 patients.”
ah. So the cells had become ‘patients’. The word ‘treatment’ had even been mentioned.
In the British newspaper The Guardian pumped lead researcher Alessandra Borsini the flat tire a little further. “We think that these proteins are responsible for the symptoms of delirium in acute covid patients, and in general for lung covid patients with neurological symptoms,” she gave a little broad. When the newspaper calls, you must have a good story, of course.
The cells were suddenly lung covid patients, with ‘neurological symptoms’.
In Belgium, the boulevard newspaper decided The last news there to make a call with the Antwerp professor of psychiatry Manuel Morrens. He could be brief about it. The British research is ‘not very innovative’, Morrens emails, when I contact him. ‘The higher the IL-6 concentration, the more confusion. We’ve actually known that for a while.’
The newspaper kept asking questions. Morrens told what he knew from the literature: about one in seven suffers from long-term complaints such as fatigue, sleeping problems, concentration problems or depression and anxiety – conveniently summarized in the newspaper as ‘psychological complaints’. “In the article they confused that the new study looked at delirium, and I was talking about older research on lung covid,” Morrens notes.
On further investigation, that one in seven is not too bad: that was at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was still unvaccinated, and patients were not yet counted properly. According to a thorough, more recent study of 76 thousand patients – still pre-omikron, by the way – about 10 percent still have residual complaints after three to five months.
And not all of them are psychological. About 3 percent have headaches, 3.3 percent fatigue, 0.3 percent dizziness, and 1.2 percent a disturbed temperature. Terrible for the tens of thousands who have it, but fortunately also a long way from the figures that are exchanged between newspapers via message exchange through The morning in the General Newspaper came.
In this way they all lose their grip on the truth, the scientist, the press release maker and the journalist. Until something very different has grown than was in the petri dish, and the alarming screaming news echoes through the world from newspaper to newspaper.
Nice for the viewing and sales figures. But less pleasant if you just want to know about corona and its after-effects.