Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

Most folks infected with COVID-19 will only have mild or moderate illness — but that means they’ll still be stuck at home and feeling really lousy. What’s the best way to cope? In many ways, you want to behave as you would if you were suffering from a cold or the flu, said infectious disease expert Dr. Aaron Glatt. “The general good advice we give to people is eat well, make sure you drink enough, make sure you get enough rest, don’t overexert yourself,” said Glatt, chairman of the department of medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, N.Y. “Sometimes patients do a little bit more than they can, and I don’t want to say it exacerbates things, but it exacerbates things,” he continued. “It makes them much more tired and much more fatigued and it can be sometimes like a domino effect.” Difficulty breathing is the most troubling symptom related to COVID-19, so you might want to order a home pulse oxygen monitor (“oximeter”) to keep track of your blood oxygen levels, suggested Dr. Teresa Murray Amato, chairwoman of emergency medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills in Queens, N.Y. Fingertip monitors can be purchased online for about $20. Blood oxygen levels “below 90 warrant at least a call to your doctor and, if persistent, a visit to your local… read on > read on >

New research offers a novel explanation for the long-term brain problems many COVID-19 patients experience. Many coronavirus patients report headaches and “brain fog” for weeks or months after they recover from respiratory symptoms. It’s been believed that these lingering neurological issues are the result of nerve cell damage, but the new study suggests that the virus may instead be striking the brain’s small blood vessels. Previous studies found that COVID-19 can cause inflammation in and around the blood vessels elsewhere in the body, so the researchers decided to examine brain tissue for the same thing in 13 patients who died of COVID-19. The investigators found that small blood vessels in the brain tissue had signs of inflammation and damage to their walls, but there was little evidence of damage to nerve cells, according to the study published online recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors noted that most of the brains analyzed in the study were from COVID-19 patients who weren’t hospitalized. Previous research has focused on patients who had long hospital stays, including being on ventilators. Those factors can make it difficult to determine the direct impacts of the virus on the brain, explained study co-author Dr. Daniel Perl, director of the Brain Tissue Repository at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, in Washington, D.C. “COVID-19 seems to have… read on > read on >

Brain drain: Arguing with others puts a lot more strain on your brain than agreeing with them, a new study finds. “Our entire brain is a social processing network,” said senior author Joy Hirsch, professor of psychiatry, comparative medicine and neuroscience at Yale University. “However, it just takes a lot more brain real estate to disagree than to agree.” The researchers, from Yale and University College London, asked 38 adults whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of potentially contentious statements such as “same-sex marriage is a civil right” or “marijuana should be legalized.” Researchers then monitored the participants’ brain activity when they were paired up and had face-to-face discussions about the topics. When people agreed, their brain activity was harmonious and tended to be focused in sensory areas of the brain such as the visual system, possibly in response to social cues from the other person, according to the authors. When people disagreed, sensory areas of the brain were less active while there was increased activity brain areas that handle higher order executive functions, such as reasoning. “There is a synchronicity between the brains when we agree,” Hirsch said in a university news release. “But when we disagree, the neural coupling disconnects.” She noted that in discord, the two brains engage many emotional and thinking resources “like a symphony orchestra playing different music.”… read on > read on >

Even people with mild cases of COVID-19 may commonly feel run down and unwell months later, a new study suggests. The study, of patients at one Irish medical center, found that 62% said they had not returned to “full health” when they had a follow-up appointment a few months after their COVID-19 diagnosis. Nearly half complained of ongoing fatigue. Surprisingly, the severity of patients’ initial COVID-19 infections were not a factor: People who’d managed at home were as likely to feel unwell as those who’d been hospitalized. A year into the global pandemic, the problem of “long-haul” COVID-19 is getting increasing attention. Some recent studies estimate that 10% of COVID-19 patients become long haulers, complaining of stubborn problems like fatigue, insomnia, shortness of breath and “brain fog” (problems with memory, focus and other mental skills). Dr. Luis Ostrosky, a professor of infectious diseases at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, is among the doctors seeing long haulers. “The number-one complaint we see is fatigue,” he said, “and number-two is brain fog.” Ostrosky, who is also a fellow with the Infectious Diseases Society of America, was not involved in the new study. He said most patients who come to his center’s “post-COVID” clinic were sick enough to be hospitalized for the infection. “People who have a more severe, prolonged illness are more likely to have… read on > read on >

Concerns about “long-haul” symptoms in COVID-19 survivors may be reignited by a new study: It finds that 3 out of 4 patients from Wuhan, China — where the pandemic originated — were still suffering at least one lingering health problem six months later. The study from China involved more than 1,700 patients first diagnosed with the virus in Wuhan between January and May, and then followed to June and September. Researchers report that 76% of these patients had at least one symptom six months after symptoms began. The most common symptoms were fatigue or muscle weakness (63%) along with trouble sleeping (26%) and anxiety or depression (23%). “Because COVID-19 is such a new disease, we are only beginning to understand some of its long-term effects on patients’ health,” said researcher Dr. Bin Cao, from the National Center for Respiratory Medicine at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University, both in Beijing. His team published the findings in The Lancet journal Jan. 8. “Our analysis indicates that most patients continue to live with at least some of the effects of the virus after leaving the hospital, and highlights a need for post-discharge care, particularly for those who experience severe infections,” Cao said in a journal news release. “Our work also underscores the importance of conducting longer follow-up studies in larger populations in order to understand… read on > read on >

A special calorie-burning type of body fat appears to help protect against an array of chronic ailments, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, a new study suggests. Brown fat generates heat by drawing glucose from the bloodstream, as opposed to energy-storing white fat, explained senior researcher Dr. Paul Cohen. He’s an assistant professor and senior attending physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City. That sort of a tissue sounds like a godsend. However, brown fat has been long thought to have little impact on human health because your stores of brown fat diminish as you age. But research now shows that adults who have active brown fat tissues in their bodies are far less likely than their peers to suffer from a range of chronic illnesses. What’s more, this protective effect holds even if the person carries excess weight, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Medicine. “When we grouped our subjects based on their body mass index, we saw that even obese people with brown fat show protection from these conditions,” Cohen said. “For example, it’s well known that type 2 diabetes is more common in overweight and obese individuals, but what we saw was that even obese individuals who have brown fat have a significantly lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes than obese individuals without brown… read on > read on >