- Long COVID affects around 5–10% of people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
- There are over 200 symptoms that have been identified, and among them are many neurocognitive and psychiatric effects.
- Researchers have now shown that serotonin levels are lower in people who have long COVID 3–22 months after infection with SARS-CoV-2.
- This finding suggests that serotonin could be used as a biomarker to help diagnose people with long COVID and better stratify patients in clinical trials.
Long COVID, also known as post COVID-19 syndrome, affects around 5-10% of people who had a SARS-CoV-2 infection, but the risk is higher for people who were
That long COVID can cause any combination of over
As far back as January 2021, some researchers started to coin the term “
It is not fully understood what causes this symptom, however, and this lack of understanding is partly due to the fact that post-viral syndromes received very little attention from researchers and doctors before the pandemic.
Chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly told Medical News Today in an email:
“Unfortunately, prior to the pandemic, we had invested very little in understanding post-viral illnesses. We pretty much ignored this area completely. Consequently, not much is known about the mechanisms of neurologic abnormalities that we see in people with flu and also people with COVID-19.”
This has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent emergence…
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