[ad_1]
Michelle Chason, a reiki mistress in Tallahassee, Florida, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on June 15, 2020. First, she developed a dry mouth. Then came the nasty vertigo spells that led to spinning rooms and blackouts.
Chason tested negative a month later, but she still wasn’t feeling well. The left side of his face tingled. She experienced chest pain, debilitating brain fog, and began to have problems with short-term memory. Four months after her initial diagnosis, in October, Chason’s doctor told her she was suffering from a long COVID.
When the vaccines began rolling out, Chason planned to wait and see how the other long haul reacted before rolling up his sleeve. But on February 10, her doctor offered her the Pfizer vaccine and she was vaccinated.
Four days after the first dose, Chason said, the symptoms – dizziness, nausea, loss of appetite, chills – struck like lightning. “I’ve been through everything I had to do since I had COVID,” Chason said.
A few days later, the vast majority of her long symptoms of COVID – brain fog, chest pain, and tingling in the face – have subsided. “I’m better, I feel better. I’m not 100% pre-COVID days, but I’m close, ”Chason told HuffPost.
Around the world, many more people with long-term symptoms – a condition now clinically defined as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or food – reported similar experiences after receiving a vaccine.
A recent informal poll from Survivor Corps, a Facebook community of COVID-19 survivors, found that 36% of people with long-term symptoms noticed improvement in their condition after vaccination. About 50% stayed the same. Other unofficial investigations also estimated that about a third of patients with long-lasting COVID feel better after receiving a vaccine.
At the same time, many others with PASC are hesitant to get vaccinated, worries that the gunshot may worsen symptoms at long range. They fear they will experience side effects in addition to the long, devastating pain of COVID.
In general, vaccines do not seem to make long-lasting symptoms of COVID worse. The Johnson & Johnson trials recruited several people who previously had COVID-19, and those people did not have a particularly worse re-inflammatory reaction or effect, according to F. Perry Wilson, a doctor at Yale Medicine and a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine.
But doctors know very little about PASC and how people with the disease might respond to a vaccine. So while it looks like the shot could improve long-lasting symptoms of COVID in a small group of people, much of what we currently know is based on anecdotes.
How COVID works in the long run and how vaccines might affect it
“We don’t know who gets PASC, who avoids it, what exactly is the cause, or even how to diagnose it effectively,” said William li, vascular biologist and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Without these answers, it’s hard to see clearly how vaccines impact long haul routes, for better or for worse.
Li said the researchers focused on a few theories about what’s going on with PASC. First, the virus can damage tissue.
“Maybe you have been beaten by the virus and it will persist for a while,” Wilson added. Some researchers believe there may be ongoing inflammation, and a third theory is that people with PASC have nerve abnormalities.
The final theory in motion is that long-haul travelers can have pieces of the virus hidden in their bodies. These viral fragments would likely be undetectable on a diagnostic PCR test often used to diagnose COVID-19 – which makes sense because most PASC patients test negative – but these viral remains could trigger symptoms.
If that turns out to be the case, a vaccine could activate the immune system enough to clear out the virus lurking and reset things. “We can’t explain this yet, but it suggests that boosting the immune system might make a difference for some long-haul travelers,” Li said.
Wilson said it is also quite plausible that the symptoms of PASC will simply improve over time, and since these patients have had symptoms for some time, improvements can happen by chance around the time of the patient. vaccination.
There is still a lot to learn about the long COVID and vaccines
We need a lot more evidence to understand why some people never make a full recovery, and if and how vaccines can help.
“More research on this phenomenon needs to be done, but the observation can be an important clue on how to treat PASC,” Li said.
Launch of the National Institutes of Health investigation in February to study COVID for a long time. And as more and more long-haul travelers receive the vaccines, doctors will have a better idea of whether the vaccines can be used as a possible treatment for PASC.
Right now, most doctors recommend long-haul travelers to go ahead and get the shot. Evidence shows that vaccines are safe under a wide variety of circumstances.
“There’s a chance it might even benefit them, but there’s a chance it will turn out really well,” Wilson said.
[ad_2]
Source link