High time for an acceleration in research into treatments for the large group of people with long-term covid complaints.
While corona wave number rages across the country so much, there was also news about the very first wave, that of March 2020. The UWV benefits agency completed an analysis of people who contracted the virus at the time and then struggled with the post-covid syndrome, formerly known as lung covid. Of them, 62 percent were completely disapproved, the conclusion reads, and 23 percent partially.
That is a disaster for those people and their loved ones. Society is also being hit hard by it, especially in times of staff shortages.
Various researchers at home and abroad have recently tried to calculate exactly how many people struggle with the post-covid syndrome. A tough methodological task, partly because different variants keep appearing. In addition, complaints associated with the syndrome also often occur in people who have not been infected with the virus.
RIVM recently concluded on the basis of research with questionnaires that almost half of the corona patients still have at least one complaint three months later, such as concentration problems or fatigue. In the control group this was a quarter, so through your eyelashes you can conclude that about a quarter of the corona infections lead to long-term complaints.
After a year and a half, the world often looks a bit better for that group, then the vast majority no longer suffer. But 1 to 2 percent still do and because so many people contract corona, it still concerns a significant group of tens of thousands of Dutch people. All people who were already heavily in the rag basket before corona? Well no. “These are people who were mostly fit before their infection and one hundred percent deployable,” said former general practitioner Alfons Olde Loohuis in this week. de Volkskrant† He is an advisor to C-support, an organization that supports patients with long-term corona complaints.
Scientists are slowly beginning to understand a little better what goes wrong with postcovid syndrome. For example, researchers find small blood clots in the blood, which means that less oxygen reaches the capillaries. That could explain the fatigue that many people with post-covid syndrome suffer from. Scientists also saw relatively more inflammatory substances in the cerebrospinal fluid.
Understanding this new disease is already a big hurdle, treating it is still an almost impregnable fortress. Abroad, scientists and pharmacists are testing all kinds of treatments, with new drugs and with combinations of existing drugs, such as a cocktail of antihistamines, anti-gout agents and blood thinners. Such ‘second-hand medicines’ have the advantage that they have already passed all safety checks. If they prove to work against long-term covid complaints, they can be deployed quickly.
It is wry, certainly from the perspective of the waiting patient, that this biomedical research into the postcovid syndrome is barely getting off the ground in the Netherlands. Here we seem particularly good at sending and analyzing questionnaires. In the aforementioned study by the RIVM, a quarter of the participants dropped out after the first round of questions. Seems to me a sign that people with post-covid syndrome have been asked enough about their complaints. It’s time to really help them.