Don’t Take The Latest ‘Long-Covid’ Alzheimer’s Study Seriously
Headline (one of many): “Long COVID may be triggering Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain: new study”
Story:
The effects of long COVID rage on.
Over 20 million Americans are believed to have the debilitating post-infection condition, suffering symptoms such as severe fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, palpitations, dizziness and muscle pain.
Now, research from NYU Langone Health might explain why some patients experience incessant “brain fog” and memory issues long after a COVID infection.
The researchers propose that long COVID may trigger changes in the brain that resemble the biological processes seen in diseases like Alzheimer’s…
“Physical, molecular and clinical evidence suggests that a larger CP may be an early warning sign of future Alzheimer’s-like cognitive decline,” added Ge…
Rage on is what I do about bad statistics. Doesn’t help me either.
Anyway, the peer-reviewed paper is “Choroid plexus alterations in long COVID and their associations with Alzheimer’s disease risks” by Pang and others in Alzheimers & Dementia.
The idea of “long covid” is disputable. The symptoms are vague, often relying on self-report, and there are no agreed upon set of biomarkers. You might equally call it ‘Long Vaccine’.
For instance, see this paper: “How methodological pitfalls have created widespread misunderstanding about long COVID” or this article “Flawed body of research indicates true ‘long covid’ risk likely exaggerated.”
In this study, those who had “long covid” were identified by “neurological complaints temporally related to the SARS CoV2 infection”. Complaints. So it seems self-report.
Our crew gathered 86 “long covid” patients, 67 with some evidence of recent but cleared infections, and a mere 26 who didn’t show evidence of being infected recently. These were their “healthy controls.” About two thirds (in each category) were women.
Among other things, people were given the “Mini-Mental” exam then hooked them up to an MRI and took models of the images. Most forget, or don’t know, what they’re seeing on MRI pics are model output.
The Mini-Mental is a proven reliable guide to mental states, but only in those suffering strokes and the like. A woman having a stroke won’t be able to answer even the first question “What is the (year) (season) (date) (day) (month)?”, let alone be able to draw the somewhat complex image the test gives you.
A person who had covid three months ago, or even “long covid”, ought to score perfectly (see for yourself at the link). Unless they are being dramatic.
So what we this test supposed to prove? The three groups were not even close to the same health-wise. Here’s their Table 1.
I couldn’t fit the diabetes result for some reason, but the percents were 15, six, and four percent respectively.
Look how much the “long covid” drinks and smokes. Look how fat they are. Look at their high blood pressure and diabetes rates. Not surprisingly, the healthy group is healthiest. What does it mean?
Thus—drumroll—any outcomes which are correlated with ill health will show the non-healthy groups as looking, well, non-healthy. And the healthy group will look healthy.
How would you know the cause of some, and only some, slight difference in scores, like the Mini Mental, was because of “covid” given these facts? Well, you cannot.
They gave their groups Neuropsychological batteries, and couldn’t really get the Ps wee enough between the groups. Meaning “no real difference.”
Pictures like this were given:
The CBP is blood flow, and ChP volume is “Choroid plexus (ChP) enlargement is a neuroimaging biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration.”
The HC are healthy controls. A very small sample: recall small samples are much more variable than large (a fundamental result in stats). Which means it doesn’t look like there’s much going on in the way of differences between the covid groups, except maybe for the HC groups.
But its small sample sort of kills the idea of knowing any real difference, especially for blood flow (the second pic).
Point is, even supposing these differences are real, and that most don’t get “long covid”, the covid sufferers group will eventually become proud members of the healthy control, so there’s nothing really to worry about.
Unless “long covid” turns out to be a real thing. Perhaps. But we still have better indictions that other causes are responsible (drinking, smoking, hypertension, diabetes).
Finally are pictures like this. These are why I am doing the Class:
It does really matter to us what these are, but they are outputs of the MRI model (the volume or blood flow) with other bio-measures. They think they have found that the markers are well predicted by the volume, and have drawn regressions with the little gray shaded regions meaning “95 percent confidence intervals.”
But you can see there is little confidence 95 percent of the points fall in those grey windows. Barely any do.
I have drawn, masterfully, red lines over the areas where roughly 95 percent of the observables lie.
The dots, remember, are real people. We want models to predict real observables (people). Take, say, the upper right figure. Put your finger on the figure at a CBF of 40. Then move your figure-finger between the red lines.
Given the model and data, and whatever other assumptions the researchers used, there’s roughly a 95 percent chance the TNF (whatever that is) of some new person lies between those red lines for people with CBP = 40.
Which is..? Right. Almost every possible value of TNF. The models’ predictive ability of actual observables is weak sauce.
(This is the difference between parametric and predictive uncertainty. See this Class.)
I wouldn’t have bothered myself, let alone you, dear readers, with any of this, because it’s just not that interesting. But since it made headlines, as these things do, I wanted you to learn how to investigate the claims behind the headlines.
Most are not worth worrying about.
See more here substack.com
Some emphasis added
Wayne
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As I write this I’m emerging from a four-month period of extreme lethargy, spent mostly in bed. I’m type A, eat extremely healthy, am an author and small businessman.
This period was preceded by a week where I lost all sense of taste. Once my taste came back I’ve had to reorient my entire diet to discover new foods that are palatable. Next, I woke up with a painful frozen shoulder and unrelenting manic condition. A trip to ER was unfruitful, my MD took care of the shoulder with cortisone and offered me an ssri for the mania (no thanks).
It wasn’t until a regular visit to my functional wellness doctor a week later that I was diagnosed with long covid (that’s when I put two-and-two together with the loss of taste for a week). Under her care I was better the next day, then settled down the next; yet it was months before I had control of whether I slept or not.
I am just now gaining energy and beginning to enjoy life again. There is no physical or psychological reason for the event. The best way I can describe it…It is like having a splitting headache, but not having any pain. It also feels like that moment when you have done all you can for a day and have no choice but to head for bed, but the feeling never goes away.
I appreciate articles like this that explore the topic. Since there are no metrics to detect or define long covid at this time, it’s a good thing to examine all aspects. I do think the article doesn’t do justice to the real suffering imposed by this condition. I would never want to go through anything like it again.
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Seriously
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So, vx’d how many times Wayne?
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Wayne
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As soon as I sent that comment I realized that would be the next question:)
Never covid vx’d.
My functional wellness doc says you can get long covid if you contracted covid before. I have no knowledge of ever having covid, but it’s not that unusual to get it and have a mild reaction. I do a lot to keep my immune system up so getting it at all was quite a surprise to me.
Note: The Mdrna shot took my dad.
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very old white guy
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I take nothing related to covid seriously as covid is a fraud.
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Wayne
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I get it. The so-called test for it is a total fraud, the lockdowns were a scam, the shots killed more than the disease, the policies surrounding the initial event were about control over the population, not science or protection.
Call it a flu if you like. The spike proteins are measurable, and real. The people who died from this round of “the flu” were real. The symptoms that came with contracting this flu were mostly unique, establishing a singular profile not seen before. The country of origin made a point of exporting it to the world. A pathogen with trackable characteristics was introduced into our society. Call it whatever you like, it wasn’t nothing.
I’m a fan of the terrain theory so if that’s where you’re coming from, I would love to hear more about what it was that overwhelmed the weaker immune systems of so many.
I’m a pretty old white guy and open to wisdom from my senior:)
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Seriously
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Seriously?
NOTHING was unique about the symptoms. I haven’t had a flu or cold for years but I remember them well. I couldn’t taste anything, I couldn’t smell anything, hear properly, dizziness, muscle pain, brain fog….ALL the supposed symptoms of cv. And keep this in mind: until 2019, in every year calculated as ‘flu season’, all previous years dating to the 1950’s, worldwide, they never counted A SINGLE PERSON over the age of 65 in the tally of the dead purportedly from flu. A couple if the articles talked about the fact that they were changing this policy, starting in the 2018/2019 season. I found multiple articles at the beginning of 2020 stating this fact and the reason for it; because so many people that age and older died from flu EVERY YEAR that including their numbers would not allow them to identify the severity of the flu. But they DID EXACTLY THAT with their covid counts, flu seemingly disappeared. Ominously, I looked for those articles again in 2023-24…they disappeared from the net.. I only found one, where it wasn’t the headline but I remembered it from my 1st query – an la times article.
And this: regardless of WHY they actually died, if their cv test showed positive, using that good old pcr test, they listed them as cv and were added to that count..
My newspaper printed up the tally of cv deaths in my city by age, other things such as race as well.. sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. Overwhelmingly, the deaths were 80+ years, a few less in the 70’s and 60’s. RARELY children and one or two here and there in other age groups. This practice continued until some months after the shots dealt out, then abruptly stopped. After the shots rolled out, within months, the ‘free’ obits that the paper had always printed, were growing in size…not by a little ‘ by a LOT! And there were so many that were under 40 years that i started paying close attention. 2 years ago, the paper stopped printing those so i have no idea now what our death rate is.
WAKE UP!
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Wayne
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Thank you for the thoughtful response!
Like you, I’ve been tracking as much as I can. I still retain the habit of scanning the news about 3 hours a day. Thank God for Principia! I’ve learned a lot through this site.
I didn’t see much in your response that I wasn’t aware of, or disagree with when it comes to the flu connection. Through all the propaganda surrounding the event I kept telling people that there is one thing they can’t hide is: All cause mortality. This had to do more with the shots than with the disease since they converted the C numbers into the flu statistics (and random accidents).
I think the “wake up” part happened a long time ago for me. During the event, 2019 – 2021 I think, I was downloading everything I could get my hands on, curating the articles and storing them on a separate drive. I was certain that at some point the meat of the matter would get scrubbed from the internet, so I kept my own library. It was labor intensive and included data on the fakery of the PCR test, rw data, studies (especially meta-analysis) and articles from sources that would make many of the points like you make. For the last few years I’ve been keeping a library of links instead. I’ve learned how to spot biases, and dig deeper into who the authors are representing.
If you are suggesting that the presence of the spike protein isn’t real, I would have to part company with you there. I believe that is verifiable and credible people have detox protocols that track with what is known about it. In my view, that tracks with the lab leak theory, enhancement and henceforth, the unique profile of certain symptoms. In my view, it’s not enough to “hand wave” a body of evidence away and only classify it as flu. I agree that had we handled it as a “normal” flu season, we would not be having this conversation today.
I’m no stranger to getting the flu, but I can tell you that for a week what I experienced had me wondering (seriously wondering) if life was worth living. During the following four months there was no lust for life (that just came back this week) and I only got out of bed to get food from the store and do the bare minimum to take care of myself. I could only work for and hour, maybe an hour and a half and get right back to bed. I’ve always been an energetic person with a 1000 projects, yet I couldn’t overcome the symptoms. This experience is unique to me.
My functional wellness doc is brilliant and I trust her judgement. This isn’t the only time she has pulled me out of something when the medical community couldn’t.
Having lived for a while I’ve noticed that people aren’t as curious as they used to be. For some reason, there is little tolerance for first-hand accounts and a tendency to lean on generalizations. It’s probably easier to cope that way.
Nevertheless, I do appreciate you stepping up to have this conversation. It is a fine quality that shows you care!
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Wayne
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Correction: This had to do more with the shots than with the disease since they converted the flu (and random accidents) into C statistics.
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