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The National Institutes of Health announced Wednesday that it is allocating nearly $ 470 million to New York University Langone Health for research into the long-term effects of COVID-19 to scale up an unprecedented national effort to study the so-called “long COVID”.
Federal money will be distributed by NYU to fund more than 100 researchers at institutions across the country, accelerating work to build a large “meta-cohort” comprising thousands of COVID-19 survivors of different ages and backgrounds. miscellaneous who still show symptoms more than a month after their initial infection.
“The only way we’re going to fix this is with really large studies that are collecting a huge amount of data on symptoms, physical results, and lab measurements,” NIH Director Dr Francis Collins said on Wednesday at ‘a briefing.
Some “Long-haul” COVID report difficulties with debilitating symptoms such as extreme fatigue, headaches, dizziness, “brain fog” and difficulty breathing for months after their initial infection. Doctors are unsure of the cause. One theory is that traces of the virus may continue to “hide” in the body, while others believe it may be the result of an overload of the immune system.
The program, dubbed the RECOVER initiative – Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery – was first announced in February by the NIH, using a pool of money that scientists had requested from Congress to research risk factors, l incidence and outcomes of the long COVID.
Some of the studies that will provide data for the initiative are already underway. The NIH previously provided funding to New York University and Massachusetts General Hospital to build the “infrastructure” for the effort, coordinate studies and organize project data.
Registration for the initiative’s new studies is expected to begin in the coming months, the researchers said, with the goal of totaling some 30,000 to 40,000 people.
This is several times more than the 5,000 to 8,000 people typically included in this type of cohort study, said Dr. Gary Gibbons, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
“We’re a lot more ambitious here. And start, launch, try to hit goals in the next 12-18 months after ownership. So it’s really moving at a rapid pace, compared to most cohorts at scale. Gibbons added.
“Very early on, we really had no response,” Hannah Davis, who advocated research for other COVID survivors, told CBSN in an interview. earlier this month.
Disgusted by the first wave of the virus in March 2020, Davis said she had faced persistent neurological symptoms as a result of her infection. Others have reported a wide range of effects, including fevers that last for more than a year, Davis said.
“We are still seeing a lot of researchers focusing only on the symptoms. What are the symptoms of long COVID? We are past that. We need to start getting into the treatment and pathophysiology,” she said.
The RECOVER cohort does not plan to study specific treatments for the long COVID in the current phase of the effort, but the researchers said this could lay the groundwork for future discoveries.
“We hope to identify therapeutic targets, and we expect to be able to use some of the same infrastructure that is in place for this observational study for future clinical trials,” said Dr Stuart Katz of New York University. .
One of the first questions researchers hope to answer from study participants is to refine the very definition of long COVID, according to Katz.
Data on the frequency of long-term effects of COVID-19 vary widely, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ranging from about 5% to 80% of infections. These studies largely depend on how scientists defined which symptoms were considered to be true long COVID cases in the first place.
Earlier this month, the CDC reported survey data that said two in three respondents who tested positive for the virus had symptoms that lasted more than four weeks after their initial infection.
“While it is true that 10 to 30% of people will have some form of COVID along, we are talking about millions of people,” Collins said.
Researchers overseas have also stepped up efforts to study the long-term effects of COVID-19, an effort in the UK recently found that people vaccinated with breakthrough case of the disease were less likely to report long symptoms of COVID than unvaccinated people.
“One of the really troubling aspects of this terrible pandemic could be the persistence of this long trail of effects on people who are not able to return to their pre-infection state, and we must do all we can. possible to get answers to that. ”Collins said.
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