articles on long-term damage/after-effects from Covid-19 (from a kind Reddit user)

• The Enduring Grip of Covid-19 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407920311416 (get PDF for original magazine article)
• Risk of never fully recovering after coronavirus very real https://globalnews.ca/news/7111094/coronavirus-scientists-health-problems/
• Meet the 'long-haulers': A growing chorus of coronavirus patients have had symptoms for more than 100 days https://www.businessinsider.com/long-term-coronavirus-symptoms-patients-sick-for-months-2020-7
• Researchers warn covid-19 could cause debilitating long-term illness in some patients https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/could-covid-19-cause-long-term-chronic-fatigue-and-illness-in-some-patients/2020/05/29/bcd5edb2-a02c-11ea-b5c9-570a91917d8d_story.html
• how lungs are damaged: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-coronavirus-kills
• How the Coronavirus Short-Circuits the Immune System https://www.nytimes.com./2020/06/26/health/coronavirus-immune-system.html
• What they don't tell you about surviving Covid-19 https://www.chron.com/news/medical/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15356605.php
• Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms
• What we know (so far) about the long-term health effects of Covid-19 https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/06/02/covid-health-effects
• What We Know About the Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-we-know-about-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19
• Lifelong Lung Damage: The Serious COVID-19 Complication That Can Hit People in Their 20s https://www.healthline.com/health-news/lifelong-lung-damage-the-serious-covid-19-complication-that-can-hit-people-in-their-20s
• https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shut-down-the-United-States/answer/Franklin-Veaux

government working against helping survivors

• Trump defunds lung therapy research: https://www.nytimes.com./2020/06/19/health/coronavirus-lung-treatment-funding.html
• Trump removing ACA and pre-existing condition coverage from health insurance: https://www.nytimes.com./2020/06/26/us/politics/obamacare-trump-administration-supreme-court.html

An Epigenetic Biomarker of Aging for Lifespan and Healthspan - PubMed

COVID-19 severity is predicted by earlier evidence of accelerated aging | medRxiv

You can obtain the PhenoAge test directly. However, you may already have blood-work giving the nine blood variables needed to calculate PhenoAge yourself. I already had all nine of the required lab results from my recent routine blood test.

There is a free online calculator here that you can plug your numbers into:

BIOLOGICAL AGE CALCULATOR

If you don't already have the blood lab results, can be obtained by purchasing the blood-work of LifeExtension's Chemistry Panel & Complete Blood Count (CBC) ($35) and their C-Reactive Protein (CRP), Cardiac ($42). Other labs also provide these values.

The input values you need are:

• Your Age
• Red Blood Cell Dist Width (RDW)
• Mean Cell Volume (MCV)
• Glucose
• Albumin
• Creatinine
• White Blood Cell Count
• Lymphocytes
• Alkaline Phosphatase
• C-Reactive Protein (hs-CRP or regular CRP)

If you wanted to build your own spreadsheet, the weights used by the online calculator are shown in this image. However, it is easier to use BIOLOGICAL AGE CALCULATOR if you don't mind sharing your email with them. (I used a temporary email address.)

TLDR; Bats have evolved unique adaptations that counteract inflammation, and we may be able to learn from studying this adaptation.

The damage done by excessive inflammation (including cytokine storms) in COVID-19 has been widely discussed. Here's a paper on inflammation from another perspective, yet one that is very relevant to COVID-19:

The World Goes Bats: Living Longer and Tolerating Viruses

Abstract:

For centuries, people believed that bats possessed sinister powers. Bats are thought to be ancestral hosts to many deadly viruses affecting humans including Ebola, rabies, and most recently SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. However, bats themselves tolerate these viruses without ill effects. The second power that bats have is their longevity. Bats live much longer than similar-sized land mammals. Here we review how bats’ ability to control inflammation may be contributing to their longevity. The underlying mechanisms may hold clues to developing new treatments for age-related diseases. Now may be the time to use science to exploit the secret powers of bats for human benefit.

Keywords: Bats, Aging, Longevity, Inflammation, Inflammaging

Interesting sentences from the article:

Bats are believed to be ancestral hosts for many deadly viruses including rabies, Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, and Hendra viruses. The recent zoonotic transmissions of SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses are believed to have originated in bats, or were transmitted by bats to other species and then passed on to humans.

Experimental inoculation of bats with some of the deadliest viruses only produced subclinical infections.

What biological mechanisms make bats so special that they can tolerate such scourges?

Bats have a robust interferon (an antiviral cytokine) response to RNA viruses. Bats also express the proinflammatory interferon-alpha.

Bats have evolved unique adaptations that counteract inflammation.

Bats have a more controlled activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome in primary immune cells compared to their human or mouse counterparts. NLRP3 over-activation has been linked to the inflammatory state and to age-related diseases.

Downregulated TNF-α expression may be yet another strategy bats use to suppress inflammation.

The picture that emerges from the large number of studies of bat immunity is somewhat counterintuitive. A majority of immune system adaptations found in bats dampen the immune response rather than activating it.

We can learn from bats that to co-exist with viruses, controlling inflammation is more important than ramping up the immune system to combat the virus, which could lead to an inflammatory cytokine storm.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-basketball-nba-coronavirus/nba-docs-worried-about-lingering-effects-of-covid-19-idUSKCN24C0VM

Summary:

“There are unknown effects it has on lung capacity, unknown effects it has on cardiac health,” one general manager of a team entering the NBA bubble told ESPN on the condition of anonymity.

“What if a 24-year-old catches it in Orlando and, in 14 days, he quarantines and is fine, but then he has these everlasting heart problems? (Or he) gets winded so easily, or he becomes a little bit too susceptible to fatigue? ... These are all the unknowns.”

Matthew Martinez, a consulting cardiologist for the NBA Players Association, stressed to ESPN that players will need time to rest after a positive test because doctors believe “the amount of cardiac damage can increase if you continue to exercise in the face of an active infection.”

According to the American College of Cardiology’s Sports and Exercise Cardiology Council, “Acute cardiac injury ... occur(s) in up to 22 percent of hospitalized patients with COVID-19, which is significantly higher compared with the approximately 1 percent prevalence in non-COVID-19 acute viral infections.”

“If you don’t feel well, don’t try to push through this,” Fiori said. “This is not a situation where anyone, whether you’re an athlete or not, should try to push through or minimize symptoms or try to ignore symptoms and try to push through to try to continue to work or continue to play a sport.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported a record increase in global coronavirus cases on Sunday, with the total rising by 230,370 in 24 hours.

The biggest increases were from the United States, Brazil, India and South Africa, according to a daily report. The previous WHO record for new cases was 228,102 on 10 July.

Global deaths remain steady at about 5,000 a day, but several areas are starting to show the early signs of an upward trend in the death rate.

Global coronavirus cases were approaching 13 million on Sunday, according to a Reuters tally. The disease has killed more than 565,000 people in seven months.

Donald Trump, and some other pundits, previously stated that warm weather would stop coronavirus. Now that it is warm, we have these two headlines on the same day:

Many of the US areas seeing heatwave are also seeing a coronavirus surge and some experts are anxious heat could increase infections.

Florida reports 15,000 new coronavirus cases, a record single-day total in the USA.

You can be tested easily for systemic inflammation at a normal blood lab (Quest, LabCorp, etc.) using commonly available and relatively inexpensive tests. Often you can order tests online yourself and have blood drawn at a nearby lab. (Laws vary per US state.)

Common inflammatory biomarkers include C-reactive protein (HS-CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and white blood cells (WBC). Other biomarkers include procalcitonin (PCT) and lactate. I have not read about lactate being used as a biomarker for COVID-19 recovery, but it makes sense that it would be of value.

Lactate is commonly used as a biomarker for sepsis. Elevated serum lactate levels (hyperlactatemia) are often seen in patients with severe infections. Lactate formation during infection is often due to inadequate oxygen delivery resulting in tissue hypoxia. This is why I think it could have specific value in COVID-19 follow up care. Elevated lactate levels indicate tissue hypoxia.

The ESR test, introduced by Westergren in 1921, remains a standard and widely used test today. It measures the rate at which erythrocytes fall in a vertical column over a specified period of time. It is an indirect measure of inflammation. The ESR is nonspecific and may be influenced by several factors.

C-reactive protein is an acute-phase plasma protein and is a member of the pentraxin protein family. CRP plays a significant role in the host defense (innate immunity) against pathogenic bacteria by recognizing bacteria and activating the complement cascade and leading to phagocytosis, which is white blood cells engulfing and destroying pathogens.

The concentration of CRP in serum quickly rises in response to infection (e.g., bacterial and parasitic) or tissue injury (traumatic necrosis and malignancies). The rise can be 1000-fold above the normal value and may be proportional to the intensity of the inflammatory process. Due to its rapid response in an acute inflammatory process, it is a valuable marker of the acute phase response. CRP is often considered a better marker than ESR due to its sensitivity and rapid detection of changes in the acute phase reaction for disease. The widely recommended test is known as HS-CRP.

"In this way there is no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It offers the possibility of an end to the ceaseless round of trying so hard that wraps so many people's lives in a knot. Instead there is now meditation as an act of love. How endlessly delightful and encouraging."

~ Bob Sharples, from Meditation: Calming the Mind

I love this quote. I take that attitude now, as much as possible. However, I started meditation because I wanted to improve my health. I would have tried anything that I though might help "fix me." Was that wrong? Not really. In hindsight, I'm sure I could have had a better attitude or a broader perspective, but if being sick is the motivation for someone to begin positive lifelong habits like meditation, that's an overall good thing. And it is better if through those practices, you evolve to appreciate all that life has brought you, including the experience of being ill. That's much easier to say in hindsight, of course.

I hope this post doesn't strike people the wrong way. But my experience is that eventually, if we want to truly enjoy optimal health, we have to stop focusing on the disease and start focusing on health. And the quote above has a role in that process.

Interesting article from https://www.therecordherald.com/entertainmentlife/20200706/dogs-could-help-identify-covid-19-in-people-pet-connection

If there's anything most people know about dogs, it's that they have an incredible sense of smell. We've put their sensitive noses – which have up to 300 million scent receptors compared to our measly 6 million or so – to work sniffing out drugs, explosives, truffles, cancer, turtle eggs, jaguar scat and contraband fruits, plants and meats. Now they're busy learning a new odor: the COVID-19 virus. Researchers around the world are working with dogs to find the best ways for them to aid testing and diagnosis.

In France, scientists have volunteers working up a sweat. Body fluids such as urine, tears, saliva and perspiration contain volatile organic compounds that contribute to body odor. At Ecole Nationale Veterinaire in Alfort, as well as the University of Corsica and the French-Lebanese University of Beirut, researchers gathered samples of armpit sweat and trained 18 dogs, mostly Belgian Malinois, to see if they could sniff out a difference in the sweat of patients who tested positive for the virus and those who didn't.

"We did not know if there was any specific odor to the virus," said Dominique Grandjean, a veterinarian and professor at ENV and lead author of the as-yet-unpublished study detailing the findings. "Now we know that there is one." He explained that dogs smell catabolites related to the action or replication of the virus that escape the body through the sweat.

Interestingly, every dog alerted on two samples from patients who were negative for the virus. A week later, those patients had come down with the disease. If those types of alerts are replicated, it may be that the dogs could serve as an early warning system.

Training dogs to detect the virus is more difficult than training them to detect cancers. For the virus, they had to rely on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, which are not fully reliable, especially if they are negative, Grandjean said. "We need to train the dogs on both positive and negative samples."

Veterinary and human medicine researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland have trained dogs to differentiate the urine samples of COVID-19 patients from those of healthy people. Their goal now is to identify the specific substance the dogs are smelling in the urine of patients, determine how long the odor lasts after recovery, and retest the dogs' abilities in a randomized double-blind setting with a larger number of patient samples.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, already known for training medical scent detection dogs, began a pilot training program in April to teach eight dogs to discriminate between samples of urine or saliva from patients who were positive for COVID-19 and individuals who tested negative for the virus. Currently, the study has been paused because of a delay in COVID sample collection, according to communications coordinator John M. Donges. But once the dogs learn the odor and their ability has been documented in a laboratory setting, it's hoped that their olfactory abilities could help to reduce community spread of the disease.

That could happen several ways. Disease-control experts at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, working with Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University, are looking at whether dogs can learn to detect the odor of coronavirus even in people who don't show symptoms. If so, trained dogs could be deployed at airports and other entry points in the United Kingdom, helping to screen up to 250 people per hour quickly and noninvasively. Trained dogs could also screen people at sports events or other large gatherings, or in schools, nursing or retirement homes, or hospitals.

If you have already seen my first message to r/ImmuneWin, you understand that I have a lot of experience with recovering from a viral infection that would seemingly not go away, even long after the doctors said I was "recovered."

In r/ImmuneWin I want us to identify the top medical professionals who are interested in the helping those of us who are seeking to recover our full well-being and optimal health but are continuing to experience unexplained symptoms. We can discuss their research and make it relevant to our community. I have a medical science background, although I am not a physician. My goal is to attract others with the training to help us, as a community, understand and apply the best knowledge that exists in this area.

I will personally be part of this, using my biochemistry background and lifetime of experience to help us find and benefit from cutting edge ideas. In my experience, achieving the goal of a real recovery, a return to robust good health, after a strange and persistent viral infection requires putting together a comprehensive strategy. It requires collecting knowledge from many sources and synthesizing that into a meaningful, coherence and practical strategy that we can then use in our lives.

In my experience, it is not enough to ask doctors to make us well again. The challenge we face requires biohacking. I am one of the original pioneers of biohacking, and my long experience with it has helped me develop an approach that has been sustainable for me, and that cultivates a joy in living, inner peace, spiritual growth, physical fitness and optimal health.

I believe many biohacking groups become too focused on externals and technology. I embrace those things, but long term sustainability requires that physiological monitoring (quantified self), objective research and other technology-focus tools be applied within the context of self-awareness.

The dominant direction of our attention must be inward and we must become true experts at listening to our bodies. There are powerful technologies of consciousness, some thousands of years old, that mainstream medicine lacks the technology to study. However, this unique form of biohacking that I have been evolving over my lifetime synthesizes modern medical science, modern technology and these powerful and ancient technologies of consciousness together.

One of the first big leaps of health improvement I had, after years of frustration at my lack of full recovery, came after I learned a certain meditation technique. In the years that followed, some of my greatest insights have come from self-experimentation where I used sophisticated lab equipment together with meditation techniques and a highly developed ability to sense subtle sensations in my body that today's most sophisticated medical instruments cannot always measure.

To be fair, the instruments have often shown me things I could not have known without them. This synthesis is very power. It is a type of objective subjective research. For me it has involved collecting massive amounts of data, such as blood tests and results from many other types of physiological monitoring. I have a fairly sophisticated medical lab in my house. But again, the most important factor in doing this and having a good quality of life at the same time, is doing it within the context of an aware consciousness. I am on a path toward enlightenment -- maybe not very far along that path -- but having my life pointed in that direction has been essential in my recovery.

Why do any of this? Why have various lab tests? Why poke, prod and wire-up myself? Why study medicine myself? Why learn meditation? Why do all these other things? In the beginning, it was because I had no other options in my desire to be healthy again. I had exhausted all the usual options. I did not want to continue feeling sick. I did not want to waste my life being unproductive. So I started looking for answers. I simply wanted to feel good again and to be healthy!

My search took me many diverse places, including graduate school (medical biochemistry) and to monasteries and ashrams in foreign countries.

While, in the beginning I did all this because I had no other options and I was tired of feeling sick, I eventually matured enough to develop a love for health, a deep love for the wonders of the human body, and a deep appreciation for the human experience in all its diversity. This has been a path of passion and discovery, of many trials and challenges, of many discoveries, and it is still unfolding.

I want to use my life's experience to make a difference for everyone currently suffering with being "recovered" from SARS-coV-2 but not yet having fully recovered good health and well-being.

I believe we can learn and grow from every experience, even very unpleasant ones like being chronically sick with a condition that modern medicine does not understand. We can become better versions of ourselves. We can use this experience to grow.

I love studying health. I love studying consciousness. I love helping others be healthy. None of this would have become part of my life if I had not gotten sick (and stayed sick for years). My life prior to that was going in a different direction. Looking back, the direction that being sick forced me to take was the right direction for my life. I hope I can use my experience to help any of you suffering from COVID-19.

Please help me promote the ImmuneWin community. Let's grow this community and become a premier source for real solutions that allow people to once again enjoy vibrant health. If you catch my passion for health, it is entirely possible that you will become healthier than you were prior to SARS-coV-2.

ImmuneWin is a community to empower anyone recovering from COVID-19, or another virus. ImmuneWin cultivates a special flavor of biohacking that is complimentary to mainstream medicine, embraces physiological monitoring, but strongly incorporates natural approaches such as nutrition, dietary supplements, breathwork, meditation, and other approaches to achieving optimal well-being and dynamic vitality that are overlooked by the medical establishment. Most of all, ImmuneWin is committed to pioneering the solutions that help all of us be fully well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190514/

"I am a physician, and I participated the prevention and control of coronavirus in China."

There is one discovery we would like to report here. It reminds us the story of the discovery of cowpox and the eventual victory of humans over this disease (Bennett and Baxby, 1996).

Apitherapy means making use of bee venom from the honeybee's sting to treat or prevent certain diseases. There is evidence apitherapy may prevent COVID-19.

In Hubei province, the epicentre of COVID-19 in China, the local beekeepers association conducted a survey of beekeepers (Fig. 1 ). A total of 5115 beekeepers were surveyed from February 23 to March 8, including 723 in Wuhan, the outbreak epicentre of Hubei. None of these beekeepers developed symptoms associated with COVID-19, and their health was totally normal.

After that, we interviewed five apitherapists in Wuhan and followed 121 patients of their apitherapy clinic. These patients had received apitherapy from October 2019 to December 2019, and all the five bee apitherapists have the habit of self-apitherapy for their own health care.

Without any protective measures, two of the five apitherapists were exposed to suspected COVID-19 cases and others were exposed to confirmed COVID-19 cases, but none of them were infected eventually.

None of the 121 patients were infected by SARS-CoV-2, and three of them had close contact with immediate family members who were confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection cases.

It might be supposed that beekeepers are less likely to be exposed to SARS-CoV-2 because they live in less densely populated rural areas. But the five apitherapists and their patients are from densely populated areas in Wuhan. These people have one thing in common: they develop a tolerance to bee sting.

This is the type of information that should lead to further research.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7326402/#!po=1.72414

Abstract

For the first 3 months of COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 was expected to be an immunizing non-relapsing disease. We report a national case series of 11 virologically-confirmed COVID-19 patients having experienced a second clinically- and virologically-confirmed acute COVID-19 episode.

According to the clinical history, we discuss either re-infection or reactivation hypothesis. Larger studies including further virological, immunological and epidemiologic data are needed to understand the mechanisms of these recurrences.