The US government is launching a nationwide initiative to study COVID-19 patients suffering from residual symptoms months after recovery, commonly known as “COVID long-haul aircraft,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday in a White House briefing.
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In this January 21, 2021 photo, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks to reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House.
The nation’s foremost infectious disease expert also unveiled a scientific name for the new syndrome – Post Acute Sequelae or SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) – further legitimizing the suffering population.
“(There are) many important questions that are now unanswered that we hope we will eventually answer with this series of initiatives,” Fauci said.
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The announcement comes after a study published last week in JAMA Network Open found that about 30% of COVID-19 patients reported persistent symptoms up to 9 months after illness.
These symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, sleep disturbances, fever, gastrointestinal problems, anxiety and depression, and the so-called “brain fog”.
“Sometimes these symptoms develop long after infection or evolve over time and can last … for months, and can range from mild, irritating to even quite incapacitated,” Fauci said.
The National Institutes of Health expects to integrate data from existing projects on COVID-19 patients into the initiative. One such project is the COVID-19 Neuro Databank-Biobank (or the NeuroCOVID project), a database and biobank led by New York University.
The NeuroCOVID project, announced Tuesday, is asking institutions and individual clinicians to provide information on neurological symptoms, underlying medical conditions, disease progression, complications and outcomes. They can also submit existing samples, such as blood, tissue and cerebrospinal fluid, to the project’s biobank.
“With so many people getting sick, it became clear that there were so many patients who seemed to have neurological conditions that seemed to be related to COVID,” said Dr. Sharon Meropol, Program Director of the NeuroCOVID project. “Some of them had new conditions, some had existing ones that got worse.”
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The database accepts information about adults, children, pregnant women and their babies. The patient’s identity is protected by their providers, as only they can see personal information; the NeuroCOVID project can only see a generated, non-identifiable code that refers to the patient.
At the start of the pandemic, health experts speculated that neurological symptoms may have been caused by the severe COVID-19 disease. But as time went on, more patients with mild or moderate disease began to show these symptoms, said Dr. Barbara Karp, program director at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
“When we get into COVID long-haul vehicles, the long-term consequences of COVID … a lot of that is in the neurological domain,” she said.
The most common symptom in long-distance travelers is brain fog, including memory problems, difficulty concentrating and intense fatigue, said Dr. Pravin George, a neurologist with the Cleveland Clinic’s neuro-intensive care unit.
One explanation for the symptoms could be that the immune system attacks normal cells in the body during infection, including brain cells, he said. It can also be caused by the inflammation or low oxygen levels that are characteristic of the disease.
No one can know for sure until this population has been thoroughly studied, George said.
“We don’t have the answers, but what’s really important is to find out what’s out there and that’s where a nationwide effort like this really plays a major role,” said Karp. “In the long term, we hope that if we can identify the syndrome, we can develop ways to approach its treatment.”
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
USA TODAY’s health and patient safety coverage is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dr. Anthony Fauci wants to answer ‘many important questions’ about ‘COVID long-haul vehicles’ in a new nationwide initiative
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