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Covid linked to risk of mental illness and brain disorder, study suggests
One in eight people who get coronavirus also have first psychiatric or neurological illness within six months, research finds
[...] adding heft to an emerging body of evidence that stresses the toll of the virus on mental health and brain disorders cannot be ignored.
The analysis – which is still to be peer-reviewed – also found that those figures rose to one in three when patients with a previous history of psychiatric or neurological illnesses were included.
It found that one in nine patients were also diagnosed with things such as depression or stroke despite not having gone to hospital when they had Covid-19, which was surprising, said the lead author, Dr Max Taquet of the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford.
The analysis, which accounted for known risk factors such as age, sex, race, underlying physical and mental conditions and socio-economic deprivation, found that the incidence of neurological or psychiatric conditions post-Covid within six months was 33.6%. Nearly 13% received their first such diagnosis.
The data adds to prior research by Taquet and others that showed nearly one in five people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder within three months of testing positive for the virus.
In the latest analysis, the researchers found that most diagnoses were more common after Covid-19, than after influenza or other respiratory infections – including stroke, acute bleeding inside the skull or brain, dementia, and psychotic disorders.
[...]The question was how long these conditions might persist after diagnosis, said Taquet. "I don't think we have an answer to that question yet."
He added: "For diagnoses like a stroke or an intracranial bleed, the risk does tend to decrease quite dramatically within six months … but for a few neurological and psychiatric diagnoses we don't have the answer about when it's going to stop."
The likelihood that a proportion of patients who were given psychiatric or neurological diagnosis after Covid-19 had underlying illness that just hadn't been diagnosed previously, could not be entirely ruled out – but the analysis indicated that this was not the case, he suggested.
[...] Although the study does not prove that Covid-19 is directly behind these psychiatric and neurological conditions, research that suggests the virus can have an impact on the brain and the central nervous system is emerging.
[...] "I think particularly this raises a few disorders up the list of interests, particularly dementia and psychosis[...]"'
https://www.theguard...obox=1611611975
'I spent a good chunk of my career designing, running and analyzing industrial experiments, and as policymakers stray further away from the underlying science, I have a bad feeling about the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines
At issue is a push to deviate from the treatment protocol that produced the highly promising clinical trial results. [...]
When the outcome of a carefully-designed experiment returns positively, the straightforward next step is to roll out the treatment "per protocol". Any deviation from the protocol requires assumptions (coming from intuition, experience, and gut feelings) modifying the science.
The point of running a randomized controlled trial is to follow the science rather than one's guts.
The specific alterations to the treatment protocol are as follows:
the elimination of the second dose
extending the timing of the second dose (if a supply shortage were to materialize, the delay of the second dose may become infinite, folding this into the first item)
the size of the first dose (in the case of the AstraZeneca trial, they had initially trumpeted a half-dose followed by full-dose treatment, which has been quietly forgotten
after the U.K. government decided to authorize a one-dose treatment. Does anyone know if the single dose is a half dose or a full dose?)
mixing and matching different vaccines (such as Moderna and Pfizer)
the success metric now based on (very small?) immunological samples and not based on cases confirmed by PCR testing
So far, the U.K. is the only country that adopts most of these as official policy while the U.S. and others currently claim they allow them for "exceptional cases". The U.S.
announced that second doses are no longer reserved for those who have taken their first shots, increasing the chance that people would not receive their second doses at the prescribed time, if ever.
A fundamental best practice of running statistical experiments on random samples of a population is that
once the winning formula is rolled out to the entire population, the scientists should look at the real-world data and confirm that the experimental results hold.
This post-market validation is hard even if properly done. That's because on rollout, everyone is eligible for the treatment, and those who have received the vaccine up to the time of analysis do not form a random sample of the entire population. So any difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups may not be a pure effect of vaccination. (This difference is why we conduct randomzied controlled trials, which allow scientists to isolate causes.)
The action of the U.K. government (and others who may follow suit) has severely hampered any post-market validation. It is almost impossible to compare real-world evidence with the experimental result, because most people are not even getting the scientifically-proven treatment per protocol!'
https://junkcharts.t...sruleyourworld/
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 26 January 2021 - 09:35 PM