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Zdenek Vrozina Profile picture
Zdenek Vrozina
@ZdenekVrozina
Health Care Consulting
9 subscribers
Sep 22 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Children don’t just bounce back after COVID.
A Bavarian study shows deep neurocognitive and emotional impacts in kids & teens - fatigue, loss of motivation, attention problems, mood disorders.
What they found🧵 85 children, ages 2-17 (avg 12.5, 61% girls). All had confirmed COVID and symptoms lasting ≥4 weeks.
They underwent multidisciplinary exams - psychiatry, neurology, cardiology, pulmonology, gastro + neuropsychological testing.
Sep 19 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
SARS-CoV-2 can turn our own defenders into traitors.
A study in Sci Transl Med, 2025 shows the virus drives neutrophils into PMN-MDSCs cells that don’t fight, but suppress T cells.🧵 Instead of attacking the virus, these neutrophils hit the brakes on adaptive immunity.
T cells divide less, signal less.
The immune response collapses from within - right when it should be gaining strength.
Sep 18 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
New study: SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t just lower white cell counts - it reshapes the T-cell landscape. Both the numbers and the quality of T-cells drop, especially in older and severely ill patients. And this has consequences. 🧵 Acute COVID-19 = a blow to T-cells. Patients had markedly lower absolute numbers of T-lymphocytes (CD4+, CD8+, naive and memory) compared to healthy controls. Classic lymphopenia - COVID cuts into the immune arsenal from the start. The immune system starts the fight with half its arsenal already gone.
Sep 16 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
What wakes up Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in Long COVID?
Most of us carry EBV silently for life.
But in Long COVID, EBV often wakes up - fatigue, brain fog, immune disruption.
Why? A new study just tested the main suspects🧵 The authors looked at 3 possibilities:
direct effect of SARS-CoV-2 on EBV+ cells
indirect effect via inflammation from infected cells
metabolic changes (esp heme)
Sep 16 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Imagine a school year where 4 out of 5 students and staff get sick with a respiratory infection.
That’s not a dystopia.
That’s what a new study just found in a large US school district.🧵 816 children and staff were followed from November 2022 to May 2023.
They self-collected nasal swabs, reported symptoms, and were tracked week after week.
Sep 14 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
New mega–meta-analysis on #LongCOVID ever prevalence.
Long COVID has affected 36% of people after a COVID-19 infection worldwide.
South America: 51%
Europe: 39%
Asia: 35%
USA: 29%🧵 Important note.
This 36% is “ever prevalence” - the share of people who at any point during follow-up had symptoms lasting ≥2 months after infection.
It does not mean they all still have symptoms today. Current prevalence is lower (eg 9% of US adults).
Sep 13 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
A new Dutch study in BMJ Open 2025 followed people 2 years after COVID-19.
Even among those never hospitalized, 43% still had persistent symptoms.
This is a massive population-level impact.🧵 Hospitalized patients had higher prevalence of post-COVID (65%).
But they are a fraction of all infections.
The real burden comes from the huge group of mild cases!
Sep 13 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
New study in COVID (MDPI) followed 297 people 3 years after a single COVID-19 infection.
Key message: cognitive performance did not return to normal. Even one infection left measurable deficits🧵 Participants.
Mild - 101
Moderate (hospitalized) - 101
Severe (ICU, hypoxia) - 95
These were infections from the era of the original virus & Alpha variant (up to 2021). Omicron was not yet circulating.
Sep 11 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
May a new NIH preprint rewrite the COVID textbooks?
Turns out SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t start with ACE2. It latches onto heparan sulfate clusters on the cell surface. ACE2 only acts later, inside endosomes. Robust methods. Still preprint.🧵 Why that matters - NIH labs have the time, tools, and independence to go deep. When they drop a preprint, it’s worth paying attention.
Sep 11 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Behind each number is a child. After COVID, kids had 2× higher risk of self-harm. Now, the same lead author Kim et al. 2025 shows: kids depression & anxiety diagnoses rise by 49% in the year after infection🧵 This was no small study. Researchers tracked 154,000 children aged 6–15 in Utah.
In 2021 -
9.2% of those with COVID developed new depression or anxiety vs 5.3% in children who never had COVID.
That’s almost a doubling of risk.
Sep 10 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
A new preprint study shows that the SARS-CoV-2 protein ORF6 directly kills human neurons.
Not by accident, but through necroptosis - a kind of cell death where neurons burst and fuel inflammation.
This may underlie the long-term brain symptoms of Long COVID.🧵 Researchers tested 22 viral proteins. The most toxic? ORF6.
In neurons, it flipped on the necroptosis switch - RIPK3 and MLKL.
Biologically - these molecules punch holes in the cell membrane until the neuron literally ruptures.
Sep 9 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Severe COVID-19 (or flu) may leave a hidden scar in the lungs - one that quietly fuels lung cancer growth.

A new preprint - Qian et al., 2025 - shows the first direct evidence of this link. The key points🧵 Human data.
In a cohort of 44M+ people, those hospitalized with severe COVID-19 had a 19% higher risk of being diagnosed with lung cancer compared to uninfected controls!
Mild infections didn’t carry this risk - it’s the severity that matters.
Sep 8 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
A new Danish study shows what many of us feared - putting kids protection only on vaccines is a dead end.
The real failure has been ignoring clean air, filtration, transmission prevention.
That’s what harms children most.
317 000 kids, followed for 11 months.🧵 The study looked at the basic 2-dose Pfizer vaccine (BNT162b2) in adolescents 12–15.
From July 2021 to June 2022 - across the shift from Delta to Omicron.
Sep 7 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Chen et al., 2025 looked at school-age kids (6–18) and found brain changes after COVID.
What about toddlers?
This new study shows that even mild infection left detectable alterations in their developing brains.🧵 Data in Scientific Reports (2025):
Even mild COVID-19 in toddlers leaves measurable changes in the brain.
Researchers used advanced MRI to look at brain shape, connectivity, and the system that clears waste (glymphatic system).
Sep 6 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
New study: Omicron ≠ harmless for kids
We often hear - Omicron is just a mild flu, harmless for children.
A new study in Pediatric Neurology shows otherwise - even mild infections can leave measurable marks on the brain and cognition.🧵 Cohort: 60 children (6–18 y), infected during the 2022 Omicron wave in Taiwan.
All had mild disease (no breathing problems).
They underwent MRI brain scans, visual perception tests, and symptom tracking at 3 and 6 months.
Sep 5 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
We age. So do our cells.
But what if aging isn’t just wear and tear - but a failure of our mitochondria, the tiny engines that power every heartbeat?
A new study shows:
Mitochondrial breakdown doesn’t follow aging.
It drives it - especially in the heart.🧵 In the past decade:
Global cardiovascular disease (CVD) has risen by 29%
CVD-related deaths are up 19%
Why?
Not just bad diets or lack of exercise - but an aging population and rising metabolic dysfunction.
Sep 4 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
SARS-CoV-2 can break immune balance - sometimes boosting our ability to neutralize the virus, other times increasing the risk of autoimmune damage.
A new study shows how autoantibodies after COVID-19 act like a double-edged sword.🧵 Autoantibodies = antibodies that mistakenly attack the body’s own tissues (aka nuclear proteins, enzymes, or immune receptors).
They’re common in diseases like lupus.
After COVID-19, autoantibodies often appear. But what do they mean for severity and immunity?
Sep 3 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A new preprint study from the NIH RECOVER cohort followed 30 people after Covid (20 with Long Covid, 10 recovered). It shows that in PASC, the immune system stays dysregulated for at least 6 months. 🧵 The antibody picture is striking.
Long Covid patients keep high IgG against envelope (E) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins
But they have lower antibodies against spike
Their antibodies skew toward inflammatory IgG1/IgG3, while recovered people show more regulatory IgG4
Sep 3 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A new RCT in JAMA Internal Medicine tested whether azelastine nasal spray can prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Azelastine is an OTC antihistamine, widely used for allergies - but it also shows antiviral activity in vitro.🧵 Why important? Azelastine is cheap, widely available, OTC - if effective, it could be a practical tool for on-demand prophylaxis.
Sep 1 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Metformin cuts long COVID risk.
A massive UK study (n = 624k) just confirmed.
Metformin, started within 3 months of COVID-19, may significantly reduce the risk of post-COVID condition.
Let’s unpack 🧵 The study tracked over 624,000 people with overweight or obesity who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 2020 and 2023.
Only 3,000 of them started metformin within 90 days after infection.
Everyone else served as a control group.
Sep 1 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A new randomized trial in Clinical Infectious Diseases (2025) shows that a nasal spray with interferon-alpha reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by 40–50% in cancer patients compared with placebo.🧵 The target group - immunocompromised patients with cancer.
These patients often respond poorly to vaccines and face higher risks from COVID-19.
Daily IFN-alpha spray acted as an extra antiviral barrier - fewer infections, well tolerated, no excess side effects.