Side effects from vaccines are not unusual, and in fact are expected. But when the COVID-19 shots were first authorized in the U.S., the effect these vaccines might have on the reproductive system weren’t known. In a study published Sept. 27 in BMJ Medicine, researchers provide more information on this question, documenting how COVID-19 vaccines can affect menstrual cycles, as well as how long the impact lasts. Dr. Alison Edelman, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, and her team conducted the largest analysis to date on the effect that the vaccines have on menstruation. It included nearly 20,000 vaccinated and nearly 5,000 unvaccinated people around the world. The work is an extension of their first study into the issue, which was focused on data from the U.S. In the latest study, Edelman found that any COVID-19 vaccine can extend the menstrual cycle—the time between periods—by less than a day on average, although it didn’t have much effect on how long bleeding lasts. The team also found that this change tended to only last for one cycle after vaccination, resolving by the next period. [video id=kgp116XU autostart="viewable"]Edelman began looking into the issue after people began reporting changes in their cycles after vaccination to U.S. government databases that track vaccine side effects. Surveys also documented changes in cycles. “Before, there was no data around this,” she says. “Now we have information to know that the vaccine does change the menstrual cycle, at least on a population level. It looks like a brief change, and it goes back to normal pretty quickly. But it’s important information to have.” The latest data add to the existing data gathered from the U.S. because they include a larger number of people as well as a broader variety of COVID-19 vaccines. While three shots (from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson-Janssen) have been approved or authorized in the U.S., other vaccines that use different technologies (like AstraZeneca’s) are also available around the world. Edelman and her team found that the effect on menstrual cycle length was similar with all of the COVID-19 vaccines. That means that the newer mRNA-based shots don’t seem to be associated with any menstrual changes than the other vaccines, which should allay concerns about the novel technology. Exactly how the vaccines can prompt changes in periods isn’t clear, but previous studies have hinted that the effect is likely related to cross-talk between the immune system—which is activated after vaccination—and the reproductive system. Temporary inflammatory reactions after immunization, similar to those generated after getting natural infections, could affect processes like ovulation, and the extent of the effect could depend on when during the cycle people get vaccinated. “At this point we don’t know the exact mechanism, but there are a lot of hypotheses based on established research that has come before,” says Edelman. “We need more studies to understand this.” COVID-19 may provide a good opportunity to launch such research. Edelman and her team are also continuing to mine the data to answer other questions about how the COVID-19 vaccines might affect menstruation, including whether vaccination affects menses itself. They are also exploring how getting infected with COVID-19 might affect periods, since infections of any kind are known to affect menstruation. Data from U.S. and global populations collected in studies so far were gathered in the first year after the vaccines were authorized, from late 2020 to late 2021, when fewer people were infected compared to 2022, when widely circulating and highly contagious Omicron variants have circulated. The studies also do not account for the potential effect of booster shots, which were not authorized in the U.S. until fall of 2021, so the scientists are also investigating whether additional vaccine doses affect cycles in the same way. While a cycle-length increase of less than a day may seem small, Edelman says that it’s important to acknowledge that vaccines can have an effect on periods. Building scientific knowledge around the topic can help people better track their fertility or know what to expect after getting vaccinated. “Hopefully this will create a foundation for information about menstrual cycles and future vaccines as well,” she says. “Menstrual cycles have been woefully understudied for so long, and we didn’t recognize the need for foundational information. Whether the cycles change or not is incredibly important to know for reassuring people and building trust in something like vaccines.” from https://ift.tt/l8nkfSg Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/
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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, health officials have warned that the biggest barrier to controlling the virus would be its ability to mutate into ever more infectious and dangerous forms. The latest version raising alarms is an emerging subvariant of Omicron called BA.2.75.2. It’s already gained the ability to evade the immunity provided by current vaccines and can’t be neutralized by many of the antiviral drug treatments available. So far, the strain has been reported in 47 countries and in 39 U.S. states, where it still accounts for less than 1% of COVID-19 cases. Here’s what we know so far about BA.2.75.2. Where did BA.2.75.2 come from?BA.2.75.2, as its nomenclature suggests, emerged from the BA.2.75 subvariant. It’s growing quickly, particularly in India—although BA.2.75.2 accounts for only 0.5% of cases so far around the world. Because it shares many similarities with the existing subvariant, the World Health Organization has not designated BA.2.75.2 as a new variant but singled it out as an “Omicron subvariant under monitoring,” which means that health officials should prioritize tracking cases in order to hopefully prevent surges in infections. Some experts have unofficially started calling it Centaurus, after a Twitter user gave it that nickname. Why BA.2.75.2 is worrying public health officialsBA.2.75.2 has picked up three additional mutations from BA.2.75, two of which are where the virus binds to human cells in order to infect them. According to one study by Swedish researchers published Sept. 16 as preprint—meaning the research has not yet been peer-reviewed—these aberrations are helping BA.2.75.2 evade all of the currently available antibody treatments authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration except for one: bebtelovimab. Made by Lilly, this monoclonal antibody treatment is given as an IV infusion to people with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 symptoms who are at high risk of progressing to more severe disease. But because the drug targets only a specific portion of the virus’ spike protein, there’s no guarantee that the virus won’t develop mutations to evade it, too. On Sept. 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Japanese scientists reported slightly more encouraging findings in their tests of BA.2.75 against available treatments. They too found that bebtelovimab could neutralize the variant, and also reported that some of the first antiviral treatments developed—remdesivir and molnupiravir—as well as the latest one, Paxlovid, also remain effective. But resistance is a feature of BA.2.75.2, which is why health officials are concerned. The Swedish scientists also reported that virus-fighting antibody levels from blood donors, some of whom had been vaccinated or recently infected with SARS-CoV-2, were five-fold lower against BA.2.75.2 than against the currently dominant Omicron variant, BA.5. They also found that BA.2.75.2 was resistant to the antiviral combination therapy Evusheld. Taken together, the scientists concluded, this variant “effectively evades the current [antibody] immunity in the population” and “represent[s] the most resistant variant characterized to date.” How well do vaccines work against BA.2.75.2?Right now, the picture is incomplete. Human studies of the latest COVID-19 booster shot—which targets two other Omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5—have not been finished yet, and it’s not clear how effective they will be against BA.2.75.2, either. But there are hints from studies involving the original vaccine about what kind of protection people might expect if the variant becomes more widespread. David Montefiori, a viral immunologist at Duke University Medical Center who oversees testing of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine’s effectiveness against new variants, is now studying how blood samples from people immunized with Moderna’s vaccine stand up against BA.2.75.2. In earlier studies against BA.2.75, the results were encouraging. In a correspondence published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sept. 9, he and his team reported that while levels of virus-fighting antibodies against BA.2.75 were more than four times lower than levels against the original virus among people vaccinated with Moderna’s shot, they remained effective. However, BA.2.75.2’s three additional mutations “could potentially make the virus less sensitive to neutralization,” he says, “but we have to test it and find out.” Results from those ongoing studies, funded by both Moderna and the National Institutes of Health, are expected in October. from https://ift.tt/qfo1Tct Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Sometimes the smallest moments of joy are the only ones that feel possible. That’s what Nora McInerny learned in 2014, when she lost her 35-year-old husband and her father to cancer and her second baby to miscarriage—all within the span of eight weeks. Her husband, Aaron, was a “naturally buoyant person,” says McInerny, who’s the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking and author of the upcoming book Bad Vibes Only. “He just had this otherworldly ability to find the fun and the joy in anything,” she says. “I learned from him the importance of staying as present as possible in the moment, even when the moment sucks. Even as he was literally dying, he could make me laugh.” (Among Aaron’s final words to his wife: “I will always be with you … so you need to stop picking your nose.”) It was a moment she remembers with levity, plucked out of an unbearable time. During these past few years—plagued by political strife, social unrest, and, well, an actual plague—many of us have struggled to even briefly escape morose moods. But experts say that incorporating just a little bit of joy into our lives can disproportionately enhance our well-being by reducing the risk of chronic illness, strengthening the immune system, and combating stress. “I think joy feels sometimes like a really big emotion—like crazy happiness,” McInerny says. “But it can be a small point of light in the darkness. It doesn’t have to be throwing the light on in the dark.” Remind me—what’s joy again?Joy is the state of feeling freedom, safety, and ease. Unlike some other positive emotions, like compassion and contentment, experiencing joy often depends on preparing for it, rather than spontaneously feeling it, says Philip C. Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University who’s authored many of the leading research papers on joy. One of the best ways to usher in joy is to strengthen bonds with friends and family. “The most intense joy experiences are probably experienced in relationships,” he says. Filling your life with meaningful goals and purpose is also essential, Watkins notes, as is cultivating an open mindset—and not just to the good stuff. “If you’re open to joy, you have to be open to disappointment,” he says. “Paradoxically, in terms of experiencing joy, there has to be a willingness to experience loss and sadness.” If you’re not sure how to go about sparking joy, start with some self-reflection, advises Brie Scolaro, a licensed social worker and co-director of the New York City-based and LGBTQ-focused Aspire Psychotherapy. First, take an inventory of what joy means to you, and when you last experienced it. Ask yourself: What’s standing in your way of feeling joyful? Then, think back on your favorite, happiest moments. Doing so will trigger some of that same joyful energy (just as reflecting on sad memories will make you feel upset). It will also give you a hint of how to achieve more joy in the future. Finally, make sure you’re present enough to soak in joy when it washes over you. “Are you listening to your friends speak? Are you tasting the beer that you’re drinking? You have to be able to register joy,” Scolaro says. “Joy is in the moment. Building the capacity to move back to the present moment—like through meditation—is the best way I can think of to be present to joy.” Here are a few ways to achieve small moments of joy in dark times. More from TIME[video id=JuzSyoYH autostart="viewable"]Make a joy bucket listRobin Shear, a life coach, speaker, and author based in Detroit, has an emergency plan for those inevitable times when everything feels awful. Instead of spiraling—and it would be so easy to hop on the merry-go-round of doom—she turns to her “joy bucket list,” a tally of all the things that make her joyful: test-driving fast cars, being spontaneous, sharing new experiences with her family. She suggests others do the same, storing it in their phone or some other easily accessible place. Having a physical reminder is helpful, “because there will be times in your life when you don’t feel joy. When life really hurts—and when you’re needing to rise out of that—it can be difficult to think about what will bring you joy again,” says Shear. “If you already did the work and made your list on a scrap of paper, you’ll find it’s much less challenging.” Incorporate daily habits you look forward toEvery morning, Deborah J. Cohan has a cup of coffee in a colorful ceramic mug. She begins looking forward to it the evening before. Another favorite part of her day: Going for a nighttime swim under the stars. “I think there’s something about joy that’s multisensory,” says Cohan, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. “You smell it, you taste it, you see it—it’s a heightened sensory experience.” Think about ways to schedule pleasurable habits into your day. Then savor the anticipation of them, because that’s part of the magic. Find a palatable way to express gratitudeThere’s strong research indicating that gratitude fuels well-being. But sometimes it feels like too much of a stretch—or, as McInerny puts it, like “a blunt-force object to force people into a better attitude.” If keeping a gratitude journal or otherwise expressing thanks isn’t a path to joy for you, think about more creative ways to reflect on and appreciate the good parts of your life. When McInerny’s son broke his arm right before the summer, he was sentenced to a giant cast that rendered him unable to swim or participate in other fun activities. “The day he got it off, he was like, ‘Say goodbye to my cast, Gerald,’” she says—revealing that even in a bummer situation, her son had created a cute, funny nickname for his orthopedic device. It reminded her to find something lighthearted and fun in every crummy situation. Now, she looks for a “daily Gerald,” or one small thing that’s good about even a bad day. Have a short “recess” every dayYou’re never too old for a recess break—a sentiment backed by ample research. Even short amounts of physical activity, in particular, can elevate your mood and cut the risk of depression. Shear likes to schedule a 5- or 10-minute play session once or twice a day. “It’s an appointment with yourself. And whenever that time comes, you stop what you’re doing and get to spend a few minutes doing whatever makes you feel good,” she says. Shear has spent recess breaks hula-hooping, for example, and likes to set a fun ringtone on her phone as a notification that it’s go time—the adult version of a recess bell. Look for connectionWhen McInerny gets lost in a black hole of gloominess, she calls someone she loves. The conversation might last just a few minutes, but that’s enough to lift her up. When she’s particularly overwhelmed, she looks for other small, tangible ways to connect: If she goes for a walk, she’ll try to catch someone’s eye. Or she might mail a friend a card. “Whatever I can do to feel connected to other people is really helpful,” she says. Dance it outMusic is a reliable way to spark a few minutes of joy, says Melanie Harth, a psychologist based in Santa Fe, N.M. She suggests making a happiness playlist full of upbeat, inspiring songs that make you want to bust a move, and then turning it on whenever your spirits start to falter. “I dare anybody to go on YouTube and watch Pharrell Williams’ Happy or Sara Bareilles’ Brave and not feel a little better”—or give up on your gloom and start dancing, she says. Help someone, or somethingRobust research indicates that helping other people, or getting involved with a cause that’s important to you, is correlated with well-being. Look for an opportunity to give back, in even a small way: by planting a tree, donating blood, or contributing to a friend’s online fundraiser. “It can help us get out of our scary little minds and into something that’s more important,” Harth says. “And it can also help catalyze an unexpected moment of joy. You never know when that’s going to happen.” from https://ift.tt/SDE3Hgs Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Pfizer asked U.S. regulators Monday to expand use of its updated COVID-19 booster shot to children ages 5 to 11. Elementary school-aged children already received kid-sized doses of Pfizer’s original vaccine, a third of the dose given to everyone 12 and older—two primary shots plus a booster. If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, they would start getting a kid-sized dose of the new Omicron-targeted formula when it was time for their booster. FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said last week he expected a decision on boosters for that age group soon. Pfizer and its partner BioNTech also announced a new study of the Omicron-focused booster in even younger children, those ages 6 months through 4 years, to test different doses. Updated boosters made by both Pfizer and rival Moderna rolled out earlier this month for everyone 12 and older. They’re a tweak to vaccines that already have saved millions of lives—a combination or “bivalent” shot that contains half the original recipe and half protection against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron relatives responsible for most of today’s COVID-19 cases. The hope is that the modified boosters will help tamp down continuing COVID-19 cases and blunt another winter surge. As of last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 4.4 million Americans had gotten an updated booster so far. from https://ift.tt/3LjBVec Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ If you spend a lot of time online, you may have noticed that parts of the internet have caught fasting fever. Online message boards are awash in posts touting the benefits of time-restricted eating and other intermittent-fasting approaches that involve going without caloric foods or drinks for an extended period of time—anywhere from 12 hours to several days. These online testimonials have helped popularize intermittent fasting, and they often feature two common-sense rationalizations: One, that human beings evolved in environments where food was scarce and meals occurred sporadically; and two, that the relatively recent shift to near round-the-clock eating has been disastrous for our intestinal and metabolic health. Mining the internet for accurate information, especially when it comes to dieting, can feel like panning for gold. You’ve got to sift through a lot of junk to find anything valuable. But this is one case where nuggets may be easy to find. A lot of the published peer-reviewed research on intermittent fasting makes the same claims you’ll find on those Reddit message boards. “Until recently, food availability has been unpredictable for humans,” wrote the authors of a 2021 review paper in the American Journal of Physiology. “Knowledge of early human evolution and data from recent studies of hunter-gatherer societies suggest humans evolved in environments with intermittent periods of food scarcity.” They say that fasting regimens may provide a period of “gut rest” that could lead to several meaningful health benefits, including improved gut microbe diversity, gut barrier function, and immune function. The past decade has witnessed an explosion in fasting-relatedid research. (According to Google Scholar, the last five years alone contain almost 150,000 articles that examine or mention fasting.) While that work has helped established links between intermittent fasting and weight loss, as well as other benefits, it’s not yet clear when (or if) fasting can help fix a sick gut. “I would still consider the evidence moderate,” says Dr. Emeran Mayer, a professor of medicine and founding director of the Goodman Luskin Microbiome Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. “[Fasting] looks like a prudent way to maintain metabolic health or reestablish metabolic health, but it’s not a miracle cure.” When it comes to gut conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), he says the research is either absent or inconclusive. To his point, researchers have found that Ramadan fasting—a month-long religious period when people don’t eat or drink between sunrise and sunset—can substantially “remodel” the gut’s bacteria communities in helpful and healthy ways. However, among people with IBD, studies on Ramadan fasting have also found that a person’s gut symptoms may grow worse. While it’s too early to tout fasting plans as a panacea for gut-related disorders, experts say there’s still reason to hope these approaches may emerge as a form of treatment. It’s clear that some radical, and perhaps radically beneficial, things happen when you give your body breaks from food. How fasting could repair the gutFor a series of recent studies, a team of researchers based in the Netherlands and China examined the effects of Ramadan-style intermittent fasting on the gut microbiome—the billions of bacteria that reside in the human gastrointestinal tract. (Ramadan comes up a lot in published research because it provides a real-world opportunity for experts to examine the effects of 12- or 16-hour fasts, which is what many popular intermittent fasting diets espouse.) “We really wanted to know what intermittent fasting does to the body,” says Dr. Maikel Peppelenbosch, a member of that research team and a professor of gastroenterology at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “Generally, we’ve seen that intermittent fasting changes the microbiome very clearly, and we view some of the changes as beneficial. If you look at fasting in general, not only Ramadan, you see certain types of bacteria increasing.” For example, he says that intermittent fasting pumps up the gut’s population of a family of bacteria called Lachnospiraceae. “In the intestines, bacteria are constantly battling for ecological space,” he explains. Unlike some other gut microorganisms, Lachnospiraceae can survive happily in an empty GI tract. “They can live off the slime the gut makes itself, so they can outcompete other bacteria in a fasting state.” Lachnospiraceae produces a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate, which seems to be critically important for gut health. Butyrate sends anti-inflammatory signals to the immune system, which could help reduce pain and other symptoms of gut dysfunction. Butyrate also improves the barrier function of the intestines, Peppelenbosch says. This is, potentially, a very big deal. Poor barrier function (sometimes referred to as “leaky gut”) is a hallmark of common GI conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease. If intermittent fasting can turn down inflammation and also help normalize the walls of the GI tract, those changes may have major therapeutic implications. Lachnospiraceae is only one of several types of helpful bacteria that research has linked to fasting plans. But at this point, there are still a lot of gaps in the science. Peppelenbosch says the guts of people with bowel disorders don’t seem to respond to fasting in exactly the same way as the guts of people without these health issues. “In ill people, we see the same changes to the microbiome, but it’s not as clear cut as in healthy volunteers,” he says. “So we are now actually trying to figure out what’s going on there.” Healthy microbiome shifts aren’t the only possible benefits that researchers have linked to intermittent fasting. UCLA’s Mayer mentions a phenomenon called the migrating motor complex. “This is rarely mentioned in fasting articles today, but when I was a junior faculty it was one of the hottest discoveries in gastroenterology research,” he says. The migrating motor complex refers to recurrent cycles of powerful contractions that sweep the contents of the gut, including its bacteria, down into the colon. “It’s this 90-minute recurring contractile wave that swoops down the intestine, and its strength is comparable to a nutcracker,” he says. Essentially, this motor complex behaves like a street-cleaning crew tidying up after a parade. It ensures the gut is cleared out and cleaned up in between meals, via 90-minute repeating cycles that fasting allows to be become more frequent. It also helps rebalance the gut’s microbial populations so that more of them are residing in the colon and lower regions of the GI tract. “But it’s stopped the minute you take a bite—it turns off immediately,” he says. Mayer says that modern eating habits—so-called “grazing,” or eating steadily throughout the day—leave little time for the migrating motor complex to do its thing. “This function has been relegated to the time when we sleep, but even this has been disrupted because a lot of people wake up in the middle of the night and snack on something,” he says. “So those longer periods of time when we re-cleanse and rebalance our gut so that we have normal distributions of bacteria and normal population densities—that has been severely disturbed by these lifestyle changes.” Ideally, Mayer says people could (for the most part) adhere to the kind of time-restricted eating program that allows a full 12-to-14 hours each day for the motor complex to work. “If you don’t snack, this motor complex would happen between meals, and you’d also get this 12- to 14-hour window at night where the digestive system was empty,” he explains. In other words, sticking to three meals a day and avoiding between-meal bites (or nighttime snacks) could be sufficient. But again, it’s not clear whether this sort of eating schedule can undo gut damage or treat existing dysfunction. Read More: The Truth About Fasting and Type 2 Diabetes More potential benefitsAnother possible perk of fasting involves a biological process called “autophagy.” During autophagy, old or damaged cells die and are cleared away by the body. Some researchers have called it a helpful housekeeping mechanism, and it occurs naturally when the body goes without energy (calories) for an extended period of time. There’s been some expert speculation, based mostly on evidence in lab and animal studies, that autophagy could help strengthen the gut or counteract the types of barrier problems seen in people with IBD. But these improvements have not yet been demonstrated in real-world clinical trials involving people. Meanwhile, some experts have found that fasting may help recalibrate the gut’s metabolic rhythms in helpful ways. “By changing the timing of the diet, this will indeed change activity of the Some of Elinav’s work, including an influential 2016 paper in the journal Cell, has shown that the gut microbiome undergoes day-night shifts that are influenced by a person’s eating schedule, and that lead to changing patterns of metabolite production, gene expression, and other significant elements of gut health. “If you change the timing of diet, you can flip the circadian activity of the microbiome,” he says. This is likely to have health implications, though what those are, precisely, remains murky. Read More: What We Know About Leaky Gut Syndrome Fasting isn’t going anywhereIt’s clear that when you eat, including how often you eat, matters to the health of your gut. But the devil’s in the details. At this point, it’s not clear how intermittent fasting can be used to help people with gut-related disorders or metabolic diseases. “For a condition like IBD, it’s important to differentiate between what you do during a flare and what you do to prevent the next flare,” Mayer points out. The research on people observing Ramadan suggests that, at least during a flare, fasting may make a person’s IBD symptoms worse. Figuring out whether fasting could also lead to longer-term improvements is just one of many questions that needs to be answered. While plenty of unknowns remain, experts say that common approaches to fasting appear to be safe for most people. Time-restricted eating, for example, involves cramming all your day’s calories into a single six-to-eight-hour eating window. Even among people with metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, research suggests that this form of fasting is safe, provided a person is not taking blood-glucose medications. That said, there simply isn’t much work on intermittent fasting as a treatment for gut problems. Also, there is very little research on more extreme forms of fasting, such as plans that involve going without calories for several days at a stretch. These diets may turn out to be therapeutic, but they could also turn out to be dangerous. If you’re considering any of these approaches, talk with your health care provider first. “We really need much better studies to compare all the different fasting protocols,” says Peppelenbosch. “But generally speaking, increasing the space between calorie consumption is a good thing for you. The body is not made to be eating all day.” from https://ift.tt/nbSIjlF Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Until recently, running was a major part of Emma Zimmerman’s life. The 26-year-old freelance journalist and graduate student was a competitive distance runner in college and, even after she graduated, logged about 50 miles per week. So she tentatively tried to return to her running routine roughly a week after a probable case of COVID-19 in March, doing her best to overcome the malaise that followed her initial allergy-like symptoms. Each time, though, “I’d be stuck in bed for days with a severe level of crippling fatigue,” Zimmerman says. Months later, Zimmerman still experiences health issues including exhaustion, migraines, brain fog, nausea, numbness, and sensitivity to screens—a constellation of symptoms that led doctors to diagnose her with Long COVID. Though she can’t know for sure, she fears those workouts early in her recovery process may have worsened her condition. “I had no idea that I should try to rest as hard as I needed to rest,” she says. Stories like Zimmernan’s—illness, improvement, exercise, crash—are common in the Long COVID world. And they highlight what many researchers, patients, and advocates say is one of the most powerful tools for managing, and potentially even preventing, Long COVID: rest. The only guaranteed way to avoid Long COVID is not to get infected by SARS-CoV-2. But if someone does get sick, “Rest is incredibly important to give your body and your immune system a chance to fight off the acute infection,” says Dr. Janna Friedly, a post-COVID rehabilitation specialist at the University of Washington who recovered from Long COVID herself. “People are sort of fighting through it and thinking it’ll go away in a few days and they’ll get better, and that doesn’t really work with COVID.” Researchers are still learning a lot about Long COVID, so it’s impossible to say for sure whether rest can truly prevent its development—or, conversely, whether premature activity causes complications. But anecdotally, Friedly says many of the Long COVID patients she sees are working women with families who rushed to get back to normal as soon as possible. It’s hard to give one-size-fits-all guidance about how much rest is enough, but Friedly recommends anyone recovering from COVID-19 stay away from high-intensity exercise for at least a couple weeks and avoid pushing through fatigue. For people who have already developed Long COVID, rest can also be useful for managing symptoms including fatigue and post-exertional malaise (PEM), or crashes following physical, mental, or emotional exertion. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends “pacing,” an activity-management strategy that involves rationing out activity and interspersing it with rest to avoid overexertion and worsening symptoms. In an international study published last year, researchers asked more than 3,700 long-haulers about their symptoms. Almost half said they found pacing at least somewhat helpful for symptom management. Meanwhile, when other researchers surveyed about 500 long-haulers for a study published in April, the overwhelming majority said physical activity worsened their symptoms, had no effect, or brought on mixed results. That may be because long-haulers have impairments in their mitochondria, which generate energy cells can use, recent research suggests. Before Long COVID existed, researchers and patients encouraged rest and pacing for the management of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The condition’s hallmark symptoms include PEM and serious, long-lasting fatigue—diagnostic criteria that many people with Long COVID now meet. A study of more than 200 people with Long COVID published in January found that 71% had chronic fatigue and almost 60% experienced PEM. For years, clinicians tried to treat ME/CFS patients by gradually increasing their physical activity levels. But that practice has since been shown to be not only ineffective, but often harmful, because people with ME/CFS “have a unique and pathogenic response to overexertion” due to cellular dysfunction, explains Jaime Seltzer, director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction. Most people with ME/CFS prefer pacing over exercise-based therapy, one 2019 study found. To pace effectively, people must learn to pick up on cues that they’re overdoing it and unlearn ingrained ideas about productivity, Seltzer says. “If you’re doing laundry, for example, there’s nothing that says you have to fold every single item in one sitting,” she says. Breaking up tasks may feel odd, but it can be crucial for preserving energy. People with new Long COVID symptoms should keep a log of their diet, activity, sleep, and symptoms for a couple weeks to learn their triggers, Friedly says. For those who can afford one, a fitness tracker or other wearable can also be helpful for assessing how much exertion is too much, Seltzer says. Once someone has an idea of behaviors that improve or worsen symptoms, they can use that information to plan their days and divide activities into manageable chunks. For many people who test positive for COVID-19, however, even taking a few days off from work to isolate is a financial and logistical challenge. Many people have no choice but to return to physically taxing work or responsibilities like child care as soon as possible. “Rest is absolutely advice that’s weighted socioeconomically and politically,” Seltzer says. People with Long COVID or ME/CFS may be able to secure workplace accommodations, such as working from home, taking on a role that can be done sitting instead of standing, or applying for disability if necessary. Seltzer also suggests leaning on friends, faith groups, or mutual aid networks for help with some tasks. Beyond that, Friedly recommends looking for creative ways to use less energy throughout the day. When she was living with Long COVID symptoms, she bought many pairs of identical socks so she’d never have to waste time and effort searching for a match. Things like that “may seem small,” she says, “but if you add those up throughout the day, they make a big difference in terms of how much energy you’re expending.” from https://ift.tt/jwO0MA8 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ The Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis this summer is a troubling reminder that some American communities are still failing to provide safe water to their residents. After Jackson’s primary water treatment plant failed, around 180,000 people were left with little or no sanitary water. It was reminiscent of the crisis in Flint, Michigan, which rose to broad public awareness in 2015, when residents learned that they’d been poisoned for months by drinking water containing bacteria, disinfectant byproducts, and lead. The crisis is far from a distant memory in Flint. According to a new survey of nearly 2,000 adult community members published in JAMA Network Open on Sept. 20, residents were still struggling from the enduring mental health impact of the crisis, five years later. After conducting a survey from 2019 to 2020, the researchers estimated that in the year before the survey, about one in five Flint residents presumptively experienced major depression, while a quarter had PTSD, and one in 10 had both illnesses. Those who believed that they or their families were hurt by the contaminated water were significantly more likely to be affected. The authors note that lead itself can impact mental health, including mood. Flint residents, who are largely low-income and people of color, were already vulnerable to mental-health issues, including because of systemic racism, a shortage of quality affordable housing, and widespread poverty. However, the researchers found evidence that the water crisis itself had a lasting mental health impact. For instance, 41% of respondents said they’d felt mental or emotional problems related to their concerns about water contamination. Flint residents were more than twice as likely to have had major depression compared to the general population rate in Michigan, U.S., or the world, and were twice as likely to have PTSD compared to veterans after deployment, according to the study. The way the water crisis unfolded made Flint residents particularly vulnerable to long-term mental-health effects, the researchers say. One major problem is that public officials’ decisions caused the water crisis in 2014, when they switched the city to untreated water from the Flint River. Even after health care workers raised alarms about high levels of lead in children’s blood, officials misled the public by insisting that the water was safe. “Feelings that the community is not being looked after, or it’s in fact being abandoned, add an additional layer of stress,” says Aaron Reuben, a co-author of the new study and postdoctoral scholar at Duke University and the Medical University of South Carolina. A lack of resources can also compound anxiety. Lottie Ferguson, the chief resilience officer for the City of Flint, noted that food insecurity made it harder for residents to eat a healthy diet rich with foods that mitigate the effects of lead toxicity. Ferguson, who worked in Flint during the crisis and whose children were exposed to lead, says that she felt for parents who didn’t have the same resources as her family. “I was more upset and more hurt for parents who didn’t have access to resources to ensure the futures of their children,” she says, adding that she understands why mistrust of officials is still common in Flint. Also complicating the situation: the water crisis dragged on for a long period of time. Although the water supply was switched back to its original source in October 2015, lead levels didn’t drop below the federal limit until January 2017. That’s left Flint residents with a lasting sense of uncertainty about their health and safety. “It wasn’t like a hurricane that came and went, and then you rebuild,” says Lauren Tompkins, the former vice president of clinical operations at Genesee Health System, a nonprofit health care organization in Flint. She coordinated the emergency mental health resources available to residents in response to the crisis. “The pipes took quite some number of years to fix. So you’re just constantly in this state, for a long period of time, of worrying.” In many ways, the water crisis has yet to end. For instance, researchers have described a rise in hyperactivity and learning delays among children. Residents still don’t know for sure how deeply they and their families were affected by the polluted water, and whether it triggered health problems they’re experiencing now. They also don’t know if new health issues will suddenly appear in the future. That’s similar to what happened after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, says study co-author Dean G. Kilpatrick, a professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, who researches PTSD and traumatic events. Although locals weren’t exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, the fear that they would be led to lasting mental health harm. “If something’s invisible, tasteless, you can’t really tell if you’ve got it or not,” says Kilpatrick. “Even the perception that you might have been exposed to something, in and of itself, is sufficient to drive a lot of long-term mental-health effects.” With the help of outside funding and assistance, Flint community members expanded mental-health offerings in Flint, both during the initial crisis and the years that followed. However, only 34.8% of respondents said they were offered mental-health services for symptoms related to the crisis, although 79.3% of those who were offered services took advantage of them. The study’s authors argue that their findings indicate Flint still needs a greater mental health response from the local, state, and federal government. There are also important lessons for other cities enduring water crises, including Jackson—such as how important it is to provide the public with clear, accurate information. Overall, says Reuben, it’s essential to recognize that crises like what happened in Flint can have an enduring impact on mental health. In Jackson, “We want the community to know we’re thinking about them, and we’re going to think about their mental health,” he says. “Not just once the taps run clear, but potentially for years after.” from https://ift.tt/7wr3eBF Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ It’s the news that public health experts expect but dread: virus-hunting researchers have discovered a new coronavirus in bats that could spell trouble for the human population. The virus can infect human cells and is already able to skirt the immune protection from COVID-19 vaccines. Reporting in the journal PLoS Pathogens, scientists led by Michael Letko, assistant professor in the Paul Allen School of Public Health at Washington State University, found a group of coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 that were initially discovered living in bats in Russia in 2020. At the time, scientists did not think the virus, called Khosta-2, posed a threat to people. But when Letko’s team did a more careful analysis, they found that the virus could infect human cells in the lab, the first warning sign that it could become a possible public health threat. A related virus also found in the Russian bats, Khosta-1, could not enter human cells readily, but Khosta-2 could. Khosta-2 attaches to the same protein, ACE2, that SARS-CoV-2 uses to penetrate human cells. “Receptors on human cells are the way that viruses get into cells,” says Letko. “If a virus can’t get in the door, then it can’t get into the cell, and it’s difficult to establish any type of infection.” Khosta-2 doesn’t appear to have that problem, since it seems to infect human cells readily. Even more troubling, when Letko combined serum from people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 with Khosta-2, the antibodies in the serum did not neutralize the virus. The same thing happened when they combined the Khosta-2 virus with serum from people who had recovered from Omicron infections. “We don’t want to scare anybody and say this is a completely vaccine-resistant virus,” Letko says. “But it is concerning that there are viruses circulating in nature that have these properties—they can bind to human receptors and are not so neutralized by current vaccine responses.” The good news is that Letko’s studies show that, like the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, Khosta-2 does not seem to have genes that would suggest it could cause serious disease in people. But that could change if Khosta-2 starts circulating more widely and mixing with genes from SARS-CoV-2. “One of the things we’re worried about is that when related coronaviruses get into the same animal, and into the same cells, then they can recombine and out comes a new virus,” says Letko. “The worry is that SARS-CoV-2 could spill back over to animals infected with something like Khosta-2 and recombine and then infect human cells. They could be resistant to vaccine-immunity and also have some more virulent factors. What the chances of that are, who knows. But it could in theory happen during a recombination event.” It’s a sobering reminder that pathogens are ready and waiting to jump from any number of animal species into humans. And in many cases, as with SARS-CoV-2, these microbes will be new to people and therefore encounter little resistance in the form of immunity against them. “These viruses are really widespread everywhere, and are going to continue to be an issue for humans in general,” says Letko. The findings come as the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ACT—Accelerator’s Council Tracking and Accelerating Progress—working group report that continued response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the form of testing, vaccinations, and treatments, is stalling. With lower global immunity to the current SARS-CoV-2 virus, combating any new pathogens, including new coronaviruses like Khosta-2, would become more difficult. According to the latest data collected by the WHO, a quarter of people around the world still have not received a primary series of COVID-19 vaccination. Ultimately, having deeper dossiers on the microbial world, especially information on how well certain viruses can infect human cells, for example, will be important to making the response to public health threats more efficient and more powerful. Letko is working on building a database that includes information on which human receptors viruses use to infect cells, and whether or not those viruses can evade existing vaccines. That way, he says, when new microbes are discovered that are similar to those in the database, researchers could have a head start on understanding how to control them. “At some point in the future, as these outbreaks continue, we won’t have to scramble whenever a new virus spills over into people,” he says. “We could plug the virus into the database, and understand that it probably uses these receptors to get into human cells, and might be resistant to these types of vaccines or treatments. It’s a 10- to 20-year goal, but it’s possible. It’s not just a pipe dream.” from https://ift.tt/CmsAUYZ Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ In a study published in JAMA Network Open today, scientists report on how effective the original vaccine and booster shots are against the COVID-19 Delta and Omicron variants. Researchers in Ontario analyzed data from more than 134,000 people, including those who tested positive for Delta and Omicron infections during December 2021. They found that people who were fully vaccinated (with two doses of an mRNA vaccine, from either Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech) experienced a decline in vaccine effectiveness against both Delta and Omicron infections, but the drop was greater against Omicron than against Delta. Among the vaccinated, the shots’ effectiveness declined from 36% up to two months after the second dose of the primary series, to 1% up to four months later (or six months after the second dose). Booster doses helped restore some of the vaccine’s effectiveness, bringing it back up to 61% against Omicron beginning a week after people received the booster shot. “The bottom line message is that against Omicron, you really need three doses for optimal protection against severe outcomes,” says Dr. Jeff Kwong, senior scientist at ICES (a not-for-profit research institute) and the study’s senior author. “Two doses was good enough against Delta, but since last December, when Omicron took over, two doses does not provide quite enough protection.” Read More: I’ve Had COVID-19. Do I Still Need the Omicron Booster? The study did not explore how long that protection lasts after the third shot, or the first booster dose. U.S. health officials now recommend that people receive another booster dose, the first one that specifically targets Omicron. The booster contains genetic sequences of Omicron BA.4/5, which now causes nearly all new infections of COVID-19. Based on the data from his study, which showed waning of protection after the primary vaccination series, Kwong anticipates that the same will happen after the first booster. If antibodies wane, then people are less protected from getting infected with the virus. On the plus side, Kwong’s study confirmed previous data showing that vaccinated people who also received a first booster dose remain protected from getting seriously ill with COVID-19, even if they are infected with Omicron; vaccine effectiveness against severe disease was about 95% a week or more after the third dose. The new Omicron-based booster, which targets both the original and Omicron BA.4/5 variants, “is a good move for sure,” says Kwong, to improve people’s protection from getting infected. But, he says, “my worry is that there could be yet another variant that emerges with other mutations. And this Omicron booster may or may not help against that.” Read More: Should You Mix and Match Omicron Boosters? Here’s What to Know The study data are a good reminder that vaccines can’t provide perfect protection, particularly against getting infected, Kwong says. For that, other measures may be more effective, including wearing masks and avoiding crowded indoor gatherings with poor ventilation. “We need other measures to better protect ourselves, and masking is one that doesn’t care what variant is circulating,” he says. “It’s unfortunate that masks have become so politicized, but the more people are wearing masks, the more protected everybody is.” from https://ift.tt/ngGo5Tw Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ |
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