Category: COVID
MRI Highlights Brain Blips Long After COVID Symptoms Have Subsided
(MedPageToday) A specialized type of MRI showed lingering brain abnormalities in patients up to 6 months after they recovered from COVID-19. Data from susceptibility-weighted MRI in 46 COVID-recovered patients and 30 healthy controls showed that the former had significantly higher susceptibility values in regions of the frontal lobe and brain stem, according to Vidur Mahajan, […]
Nov 29, 2022
Is it Covid, flu or RSV? A few hallmarks can help distinguish among the illnesses
(NBC News) Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are together driving a national wave of respiratory illnesses. Around 76% of U.S. hospital inpatient beds are full, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Pediatric beds are at a similar level, though six states have 90% or more of their pediatric beds full, […]
Nov 28, 2022
COVID-19 disrupts gut microbiome
(NIH) The trillions of microbes living in the gut—bacteria, fungi, and viruses—are known collectively as the gut microbiome. Research has shown that changes in gut microbes may contribute to a variety of diseases and conditions. COVID-19 patients often have imbalances in their gut microbes that allow antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections to take over. These patients also […]
Nov 22, 2022
What Covid taught scientists and the public about the flu
(NBC News) For nearly three years, the medical and scientific world scrutinized Covid. That research helped experts gain a new understanding of a much older virus: the flu. On March 3, 2020, the head of the World Health Organization began a daily press briefing exhorting countries around the world to do more to stop the spread […]
Nov 22, 2022
Vaccine Breakthrough Could Finally Bring COVID to Its Knees
(DailyBeast) With new COVID variants and subvariants evolving faster and faster, each chipping away at the effectiveness of the leading vaccines, the hunt is on for a new kind of vaccine—one that works equally well on current and future forms of the novel coronavirus. Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they’ve found a […]
Nov 21, 2022
Rare, convergent antibodies targeting the stem helix broadly neutralize diverse betacoronaviruses
(Cell Host and Microbe) Humanity has faced three recent outbreaks of novel betacoronaviruses, emphasizing the need to develop approaches that broadly target coronaviruses. Here, we identify 55 monoclonal antibodies from COVID-19 convalescent donors that bind diverse betacoronavirus spike proteins. Most antibodies targeted an S2 epitope that included the K814 residue and were non-neutralizing. However, 11 […]
Nov 21, 2022
Consequences of COVID Reinfection (Podcast)
(MedPageToday) THealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week.
Nov 21, 2022
As global COVID cases rise, multiple viruses stress health systems
(CIDRAP) Global COVID-19 cases showed a small rise last week, with infection increasing in three world regions, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today in its weekly update. In some countries in the Americas—one region where cases are rising—brisk flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) activity is also straining hospitals, prompting a warning today from the […]
Nov 17, 2022
BA.5 is no longer dominant in the U.S. for the first time since July, as two new subvariants take over
(NBC News) The two coronavirus subvariants, BQ.1.1 and BQ.1, seem to be better at evading immune defenses and together make up 44% of new Covid cases. Two new omicron subvariants have overtaken BA.5 as the prevailing versions of the coronavirus in the U.S. BA.5 became dominant in July, then consistently accounted for the majority of new […]
Nov 17, 2022
Variant-specific symptoms of COVID-19 in a study of 1,542,510 adults in England
(Nature) Infection with SARS-CoV-2 virus is associated with a wide range of symptoms. The REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission −1 (REACT-1) study monitored the spread and clinical manifestation of SARS-CoV-2 among random samples of the population in England from 1 May 2020 to 31 March 2022. We show changing symptom profiles associated with the different variants […]
Nov 15, 2022