People who got covid vs other viruses. When you follow up with them 3 months later, there is no difference in symptoms between the groups. In other words, long covid symptoms are no worse than any other respiratory virus.
So is it covid causing the symptoms, or the pandemic? All signs point to the pandemic, and the response.
Every other long covid study are observational, and are likely confounded. Strongly recommend looking deeper at these studies. Very few have control arms, like this study does.
> People who got covid vs other viruses. When you follow up with them 3 months later, there is no difference in symptoms between the groups. In other words, long covid symptoms are no worse than any other respiratory virus.
Erm, doesn't that also just mean that there is "Long <Insert Any Virus>" that we have been ignoring prior to Covid?
I think that's pretty much the accepted explanation in the medical field? A small percentage of people have always been getting autoimmune and other disorders after a virus infection. With Covid it's just become a lot more obvious given the volume.
The way Covid makes the immune system cause irreparable lung scarring that then sticks with people for the rest of their life also probably compounds other problems.
That’s where my thoughts have been leading, too. I remember when people used almost the same kind of condescending tone dismissing myalgic encephalomyelitis as “Incline Village yuppie syndrome” until the weight of evidence won out. I think we’re sort of primed for it with the combination of hard-to-diagnose symptoms and various cultural tropes about whingers, disability cheats, etc. — if it caused unambiguous problems (e.g. polio’s paralysis or when COVID causes lung scarring visible on X-rays) almost everyone would accept that it was real without arguing but when you have the combination of relatively low incidence and things which aren’t easy to find on a simple test, it’s just a bit too easy to dismiss. I suspect the continuing improvements in diagnostic technology are going to push out the upper bounds for how long a case of many diseases can linger.
There’s probably also some link to the reminder of our own mortality & the degree to which luck matters: a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of disability and want to believe they have more agency than they do.
Yes, to an extent. But many people are reporting symptoms like anxiety, depression, or brain fog, which, while could be caused by the virus, could also be caused by the pandemic. Fear, isolation, lack of social interactions can cause detrimental damage, and this should not be overlooked.
One thing is really different though : I had the flu (the real one) once in my life. I had covid at least twice (the third time I didn't bother getting checked) I as many years.
Maybe the severity of the symptoms is worse; or maybe people are getting medical care more than is common for 'common' colds.
The smart parts of the response to the pandemic included: limiting risk / exposure, additional precautions while exposed, and a higher standard of care.
Now that the Endemic phase is here we must continue to limit risk where realistic, take precautions (and vaccinations) seriously, and it really would be nice if the _right_ to healthcare were made law and reality.
This is an incorrect interpretation of this paper. It is comparing COVID positive to assumed COVID non-positive. Also, the methodology is deeply flawed as they took the first 1000 folks to respond. This is an incredibly biased approach, akin to believing that individuals who submit reviews online are from a normal distribution.
I've driven around with my mask on. You're busy and having worn it for hours already you dont really think or notice it, until you do half way to your destination type thing.
Aligning someone wearing a mask in their car to so mass brainwashing, Id suspect its more likely an innocent reason such as mine vs people thinking they need to wear it in a car.
There's really not much information in just seeing that situation. When I drove for 2min between a supermarket and a clinic, I didn't bother taking it off for example. (Also a good idea not to touch it anyway) You'll need to actually have the context of why they have it on.
> If you're not ripping the mask off first chance you get it's most likely because it gives you psychological comfort like a blankey or a teddy bear.
Or maybe their sister has an autoimmune disease and their mother just had open heart surgery. For fucks sake you don't know what's going on in other people's lives.
Driving alone in a car with a mask on is pretty pointless, but I haven't seen people do that since the height of the pandemic, personally. Probably still happens, but certainly doesn't seem anything on a "mass psychosis" level.
On the other hand, I drove with a mask on a few times - but that's when I was sick and attempting to reduce the chances of getting family members present in the car sick too.
I'd do it when I had several stops to make. No point taking it off and potentially contaminating my hands just to put it back on again. I suspect that accounts for many others doing so too.
“Long Covid” is just our euphemism for adverse reactions. The fact that you’re not even allowed to bring this up casts serious doubt on all studies into the phenomenon.
If you look at the evidence hierarchy, this study is at the lowest form of evidence (it's a narrative review -i.e expert opinion), they didn't even run a study.
The ultimate study would multiple randomized controlled trials showing sugar/fructose when controlled for calories, causes increased Alheimer's disease. Since we haven't seen that, we should not draw conclusions.
As the saying goes 'correlation does not imply causation'. We don't even have correlation yet, the headline is an overreach.
Agree that it's a poor headline and that the fructose/Alzheimer's hypothesis is quite speculative, but I don't think calling it a "junk study" or gesturing at evidence hierarchies is particularly helpful.
Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution.
Your general point, that drawing firm conclusions would be radically premature, is spot on. I just stiffen up a bit when I encounter "RCT or GTFO" type arguments; where in the world do you think the ideas for which RCT to run come from?
While I agree that these theory based papers are useful, and are often the precursor to experiments, I believe the general understanding of "study has found X" in pop culture is that there is "hard evidence" of the finding being tauted. Theories are risky to place too much credence in without being steeped in the field yourself (is this a theory that most people in the field agree with, or is the one suggesting it an outlier?).
As usual science communication is never done as well as we could all hope, but I personally like this "hierarchy of evidence" approach in understanding if something is ready to be consumed by the general public, rather than requiring further discussion with the scientific community.
Agreed. At this point I am also not willing to just let science off the hook and blame it all on the press: If our smartest people can not find ways to differentiate between ideating and good results in a way that a sensationalist press can't simply ignore, then just maybe they are not trying all that hard.
I wish sci comms practice would have a standard set of terms for stages of development/belief. Here the headline should be something like “theory proposed that …”
Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution.
This is the case in physics and astronomy. People make predictions that are not only untested, but we have to invent equipment to test them.
One of the great early accomplishments in science was when astronomers, observing our Sun, noted an unknown yellow spectral line signature. In 1868, Norman Lockyer predicted that it must be created by a hitherto unknown element, which he named “Helium” after the Greek Titan of the Sun, Helios.
In 1895, two Swedish chemists detected helium in ore samples here on Earth, and in the great tradition of the scientific method, we had a theory, a prediction, and a confirmation of the theory by test.
I'm not sure it's always the case that theory precedes evidence, even in physics. We still have loads of evidence that theory does not explain, dark matter, dark energy and superconductivity being the most well known. Theory is often devised to explain something weird or unexpected that experimentalists observe.
Upon reflection, you’re making an excellent point!
Einstein predicted things we’re still confirming empirically, but then again, he started by asking himself how the speed of light could be constant for every observer, which was the result of an experiment that failed to confirm a different theory.
There's nothing wrong with research like this per se. I think the way it's publicised is the main issue. Broadly I think there are two types of papers: those who are only relevant to other researchers, and those who are interesting to the public as a whole. This is very much in the former category.
how do you expect we will ever get a randomized control trial controlling for fructose in diet?
Your right, but RCT would take how long? 50 years? How can you make people not eat fructose or limit that for 50 years?
Wouldnt call the article junk sciensce. We also need hypothesis builing articles. I think they are proposing a specific mechanism of action about how fructose might cause Alzheimers.
I believe there are other clues also pointing in this direction, which I wont bore you with.
Just want to note, that I think everyone would prefer high powered RCTs, but I dont believe they are feasible to fund and run
We won't. That's why nutrition epidemiology studies are so bad and mostly useless. It's ok to simply say "let's not do this study which we know won't add anything to our knowledge of how nutrition affects health outcomes in real people". See David Chapman for an entertaining review: https://metarationality.com/nutrition
I would say this comment is a bit unfavorable. The study details some metabolic pathways that were recently discovered and are activated by fructose intake. They then explore a hypothesis as to why this could lead to certain outcomes like Alzheimer's.
Not exactly a "junk study." It's step 1 in a chain of studies that could validate this hypothesis.
A review article is not necessarily junk science. This sort of paper is the first step in allowing us to conduct the more interventional studies you recommend.
Trusting a random commenter to dismiss the contents of an article for you seems almost as bad as only reading the headline. In both cases you're putting full faith in someone else to summarize the article in a way that serves their interests more than yours.
You probably still want to at least look at the research yourself, trusting other "off-hand" comments is, uh, ironically, akin to the moral from the "off-hand" parent comment in this case
Right, I never drink straight fruit juice. Those large bottles of orange or apple juice commonly seen in supermarkets I consider dangerous, everyone ought to avoid them.
I predict HN will look on this favorably anyway, because my experience is that a rather large number of them are practitioners of ketogenic or other high-fat low-carb diets and 'fructose bad' may as well be part of their religion.
Nobody can answer this for you. They are describing what works best for them. Find what works best for you. Forget what is optimal. What is something you can do consistently for years. If that's walking, then walking is still better than sitting.
I found watching TV while working out is a great motivator. Consider that as well.
And lastly. I've been working out consistently for over a decade. I still don't like it. Get your feelings out of this. Think of it like brushing your teeth.
I question the relevance of this with cloud based solutions such as AWS Lambda, where you can spin up a production ready auto-scaled service very quickly; it certainly reduces the cost of ownership and operations. Sure if you are a team of 20 developers working on an app - go monolith.
But if you are a 300 person organization launching something from the ground up, I would choose many serverless solutions over a single monolith.
People who got covid vs other viruses. When you follow up with them 3 months later, there is no difference in symptoms between the groups. In other words, long covid symptoms are no worse than any other respiratory virus.
So is it covid causing the symptoms, or the pandemic? All signs point to the pandemic, and the response.
Every other long covid study are observational, and are likely confounded. Strongly recommend looking deeper at these studies. Very few have control arms, like this study does.