I had a cold last month, but I’m still getting rid of a mild cough. This seems pretty timely for me.
The findings suggest there may be long-lasting health impacts after non-Covid acute respiratory infections such as colds, influenza, or pneumonia, that have been going unrecognised.
However, the researchers do not yet have evidence suggesting that the symptoms have the same severity or duration as long Covid.
I’m an otherwise pretty healthy person who gets knocked out by anything respiratory. My entire life, ever since I was a kid, if I get a cold, the flu, anything, it’s going to be weeks to months of feeling terrible. I always hated how casual everyone around me was with their illness, like oh, it’s just a cold, yeah, well that cold is going to have me unable to sleep for the next 2 weeks and feeling generally awful for at least the next 2 after that, so please wash your hands after you sneeze on them. Twice now I’ve had the flu and taken over 4 months to recover and stop feeling like my lungs were filling with fluid every time I did any type of exercise.
Ugh. That’s rough.
Me too. I found out in my thirties that I have (fortunately relatively mild) cystic fibrosis and that was the reason for it.
Ugh, that sucks. I suspect I have some underlying condition because whenever I actually stop being lazy and do cardio like running I’ll cough for days afterwards. I love running and used to run almost daily but got sick of constantly having a runner’s cough. But all my medical checkups have been great and I feel like if I complain about the fact that when I get sick it takes forever to recover and cough when I exercise it’s going to be too vague of a complaint for them to do anything about or care.
Heh, that was the first symptom that got me on my very long road to diagnosis. I would cough after strenuous exercise and sex. But that was it. I didn’t smoke or engage in anything that should cause a cough, I was young, etc. Took a looong time before I finally saw a pulmonologist who could recognize bronchiectasis on a CT, which I apparently had already had for years at that point. Bronchiectasis, in relatively young people, is almost exclusively caused by cystic fibrosis, so that got the ball rolling on the long path to diagnosis.
Some doctors may not like to know that they are your second opinion or third opinion, but it kind of saved me continuing to go to different doctors.
Not to say that you have anything so serious. It’s extremely unlikely that you do. In fact, the most common cause of a mysterious cough is post nasal drip, if I recall correctly. I just think that people are less aware of these sorts of possibilities than they ought to be. I literally laughed when my pulmonologist first suggested I might have CF.
Edit: to be a little more helpful, you might want to try something like an Aerobika flutter device and/or a nebulizer (you’d need a prescription). They’re good for helping to clear out the lungs, and you don’t need to have some sort of special condition to use them.
Wow, this is interesting! I really need to stop brushing it off and actually do something about it, but it’s just so much easier to ignore things sometimes :)
I hope you have a long, healthy life!
My daughter is in a similar situation. It’s very frustrating to take her to some kids event and have kids around who are coughing and sniffling. I get it, it’s minor and they want to enjoy this event. But if my daughter gets sick, she’ll be nigh incapacitated for the next week or two by this “minor illness”. That “light cough” will have her coughing so hard that she vomits. She’s basically relegated to laying around and reading or watching TV. It makes school tough and is a fairly large part of why we homeschool.
Oh man. This caused a flashback to that time I had a 3 day long cold that caused me to cough non-stop for the next month until I went to the doctor for steroids to make it stop.
I had periods when I was younger where I’d be congested for months at a time.
Ask someone with CFS/ME. This should have been common knowledge for about half a century or so.
Yep. Person here with CFS/ME prior to Covid being treated by a research team that is now also studying Long Covid. AMA ✋
Is there a treatment that works? What are they testing right now?
So, the team that I’m seeing at Brigham & Women’s in Boston has a testing protocol called invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing or iCPET, which involves putting a tube into a large vein in the neck, putting a heart catheterization through that, then putting a tube in an artery in the wrist. This allows monitoring and comparison of blood pressures inside the heart vs. outside the heart as well as comparison sampling of arterial blood vs. venous blood. In addition to this, they apply EKG heart monitoring and respiratory monitoring via a gadget you hold in your mouth and breathe through. With all this insanity in place, they put you on an exercise bike until you can’t stand it anymore.
What they find on this test is a combination of two things. First, the pressures inside the ventricles of the heart do not increase in response to increased physical activity the way that they should. “Low ventricular filling pressure caused by preload failure.” And second, the DEoxygenated blood returning to the heart has too much oxygen in it, indicating poor oxygen uptake on a cellular level, which they hypothesize is caused by mitochondrial problems.
The treatments include a drug called pyridostygmine, which increases acetylcholine neurotransmitter to increase autonomic nervous system response to physical activity (and therefore increase blood return to the heart). Or a drug called midodrine, which also supports blood pressure. Plus supplements to support mitochondrial function like CoQ10, creatine, and ALCAR.
I’m not cured and back to where I was prior to getting sick by any means, but I’m able to hold down a full time job, which prior to treatment I most definitely would not have been able to.
Thank you very much for your answer. Very interesting therapies they are testing and I’ll have a look if there are similar studies done here in Germany. I wish you all the best for your future and really hope, that they will find a way to completely treat it.
Thanks for the well wishes. Also last year I participated in a clinical trial with this same team at the Brigham. The drug trialed there is called bocidelpar. It targets a mitochondrial receptor called PPAR-δ. We’re still waiting on the results of that trial to be released and it’s probably a good 3-5 years away from FDA approval in the US if all goes well. So here’s hoping for the best
I guess CFS/ME is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Crucially:
However, the researchers do not yet have evidence suggesting that the symptoms have the same severity or duration as long Covid
…
Martineau said people with Covid in the study were more likely to suffer taste and smell problems and light-headedness or dizziness than those without. They also suffered heart palpitations, sweating and hair loss.
Those in the non-Covid group were more likely to have a cough or a hoarse voice than people with Covid. Both groups suffered breathlessness and fatigue.
The article is confusing. Are they saying COVID causes long colds? In other words now that COVID is like the common cold when you get it, they are just saying you have mild long COVID I think?
The visibility of long-COVID has led people to reevaluate whether other viruses cause “long” syndromes. It looks like rhinovirus (aka “the common cold”) can, too.
There are other viruses that were already known to cause “long” symptoms, often due to damage caused to the nervous system by the virus or the immune response. Post-polio syndrome has been known for a long time, for example.
Thansl for clarifying. This is very interesting.
That’s a very succinct explanation!
