SARS-CoV-2

A new biopsy study found long-COVID patients' nerve damage is gut-specific: skin biopsies from the same patients came back normal, while gastric nerve density tracked with heart-rate variability and a cardiac marker, pointing to a structural cause behind the nausea and bloating many patients report.

A reader flagged what the headline skipped: the control group was eight people. A physician in the thread went further, arguing gut damage is the smaller half of long COVID's real driver, one seated in the brain instead.

Pathologists autopsied 74 people who had lived with COVID for at least 60 days before they died. In 11, the virus was still replicating inside the heart, and those 11 were far more likely to have died with the chest pain, palpitations, and breathlessness of cardiac long COVID: 82% versus 37%.

The finding is a conference abstract, not a published paper. A physician in the thread flagged the catch: the same theory was already tested with extended Paxlovid in real long COVID trials, and both came back negative.