For Long COVID Sufferers, Good News and Bad News

For those battling the vague but debilitating condition that has come to be known as long COVID, it's a mix of good and bad news.

• The bad: British researchers measured the cognitive impairment of those with the diagnosis and found that it's the equivalent of their brains aging 10 years, reports Smithsonian. Patients with long COVID frequently complain of brain fog, and the new study out of King's College London suggested it's as bad as they say. The study involved 3,000 people who took a battery of tests measuring memory, attention span, processing speed, etc. The tests were conducted in two rounds, months apart, and patients generally showed no improvement from the first to the second. For some subjects, their brain fog had persisted for more than two years. One silver lining: When the COVID symptoms finally lifted, brain function improved.

• The good: The National Institutes of Health, after taking much criticism for a slow response, is getting aggressive in the quest to find treatments. The agency said Monday it is launching four clinical trials on potential remedies, and seven more will follow, reports the Washington Post. The first, for example, will focus on employing a longer-than-usual regimen of the antiviral medication Paxlovid. Somewhere between 10% and 30% of people are believed to have experienced long COVID to some degree after recovering from a coronavirus infection, per the AP. Brain fog is a common symptom, but about 200 others are in play. "If I get 10 people, I get 10 answers of what long COVID really is," says US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

(More long COVID stories.)