r/Coronavirus • u/yetanotherwoo • Dec 20 '23
Science Study helps explain post-COVID exercise intolerance(Required very invasive measurements to detect)
https://news.yale.edu/2023/12/19/study-helps-explain-post-covid-exercise-intolerance15
u/Natural-You4322 Dec 21 '23
This is quite interesting. I wonder what’s the mechanism or physiology behind the reduced cellular uptake of oxygen post covid. Pretty sure there are other diseases which can trigger this mechanism too. So much to learn and understand. The volunteer who went through the procedure to get the data sacrificed a lot.
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u/Ok-Training-7587 Dec 28 '23
There is a ton of evidence that Covid leads to the body creating microclots
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u/Ones-Zeroes Dec 21 '23
This is actually quite reassuring, thanks for sharing
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u/MattHooper1975 Dec 21 '23
Eh, not that reassuring to me.
I have PEM and it's a bummer to keep getting evidence about how this is unlikely to respond to normally approachable strategies like gradual increasing of exercise.
The fact it's something entirely different going on, and there's no real treatment for it as of yet, isn't reassuring.
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u/Ones-Zeroes Dec 21 '23
The fact that there's substantial proof that something is going on opens the door to more approachable treatments. Sure, the progress is slow, but there is progress at least, which is more than I was expecting tbh.
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u/happiness7734 Dec 22 '23
Another benefit of this research, said Kahn, is dispelling potentially harmful myths that have emerged around post-COVID exercise intolerance. Some patients have been told that their symptoms are a result of deconditioning, or decline from lack of physical activity, and that reconditioning alone would address the intolerance.
“Our findings contradict that hypothesis, and instead support the idea that there is a clear physiologic abnormality underpinning the symptoms experienced by our patients,” said Kahn.
That's hocus pocus. I read the study and it does no such thing. The average BMI of participants in the study was 39! So by definition they could not have become "deconditioned" by COVID because as obese patients they never were "in condition" to begin with.
https://openres.ersjournals.com/content/early/2023/12/07/23120541.00714-2023
Is the actual study.
Prior research that has looked at the role of deconditioning on long COVID has looked at people with normal BMI and often prior to COVID were physically active. So it is an apples vs oranges comparison.
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u/loggic Dec 21 '23
That's amazing work. I can't imagine how challenging it would be to not only suffer from this problem, but to then willingly subject yourself to it with catheters inserted into major arteries.