By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that requires further studies to corroborate the findings and has not yet been certified by a peer review.
High pressure oxygen treatment can help long-term COVID
Patients with long COVID may see some improvement after breathing pure oxygen in a high-pressure air environment, according to data from a small Israeli trial.
The researchers randomly assigned 73 patients with post-COVID symptoms that lasted at least three months to receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) or simulated treatment. Patients in the HBOT group spent 40 sessions breathing pure oxygen in a room where the air pressure was two to three times higher than normal, which allowed the lungs to receive more oxygen than normal. Shortly after the last treatment, the HBOT group showed “significant improvement” compared to the simulated group in thinking skills, energy, sleep, psychiatric symptoms and pain, according to a report published Tuesday in Scientific Reports. Symptomatic improvement was associated with evidence of MRI of structural and functional healing of the brain and improved delivery of oxygen-carrying blood to the brain, the researchers said.
OHB is often used to treat wounds that do not heal well and has recently been tested as a treatment for traumatic brain injury, but this is the first randomized trial to test it for long COVID-19. Extensive studies are needed to confirm the findings and identify patients who could benefit, the researchers said.
Previous Omicron infection may protect against BA.4 / BA.5
The researchers say young and middle-aged adults who were infected with earlier versions of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus are likely to have “strong” protection against reinfection with the currently dominant Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
It won’t be like that if they were infected with a variant circulating before Omicron, however, according to a Qatar study. The researchers found that, after considering the vaccination status, infection with a pre-Omicron version of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be only 15.1% effective in preventing symptomatic reinfection by BA.4 / BA.5 and 28.3% effective in preventing any BA.4 / BA.5 reinfection. Previous Omicron infection, however, was 76.1% effective against symptomatic reinfection by BA.4 / BA.5 and 79.7% effective against any reinfection by BA.4 / BA.5. The study did not assess the severity of the reinfection. In a report published in medRxiv on Tuesday before the peer review, researchers point out that the results may not be applicable to the elderly, given that in Qatar only 9% of residents are over 50 years old.
The story goes on
The study also showed that protection against infections with variants prior to Omicron was weaker against BA.4 / BA.5 than against BA.1 / BA.2, “indicating that these two new variants have a greater ability to escape the immune system. -response of the system, “said study leader Laith Jamal Abu Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar.
COVID-19 vaccines are related to longer periods for some women
According to a new study, vaccination against COVID-19 may be associated with a short-term lengthening of the menstrual cycle for some women.
The findings are drawn from 3,858 nurses in the United States and Canada who have been completing questionnaires about their periods twice a year since 2011. As of December 2021, 91% of them had been vaccinated against coronavirus. . Prior to the pandemic, 15% reported irregular cycles; which rose to 22.7% in 2021, researchers reported Wednesday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Vaccinated women had a 54% higher risk of increasing the length of the cycle compared to unvaccinated women, regardless of the type of vaccine and even after taking into account the pandemic stress and the factors related to the health, according to the report. In a more detailed analysis, vaccination was only associated with the change to longer cycles during the first six months after vaccination and among women whose cycles were short, long, or irregular before vaccination, not between women with regular cycles of normal duration.
“A normal menstrual cycle is characterized by tightly regulated inflammatory and immune mediators” that may be temporarily affected by the body’s immune response to vaccines, the researchers said. They call for monitoring of “menstrual cycle health in vaccine clinical trials and greater attention to gender-based differences in vaccine response.”
For the Reuters Global COVID-19 Tracker chart, click: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/index.html
For Reuters COVID-19 Vaccination Tracker, click: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/vaccination-rollout-and-access.
(Report by Nancy Lapid; Edited by Bill Berkrot)