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Zdenek Vrozina Profile picture
Zdenek Vrozina
@ZdenekVrozina
Health Care Consulting
Jun 19 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
139 kids who'd had COVID. Half of them turned up with autoantibodies - antibodies that attack the body's own tissues. In uninfected kids, only 14%. And it barely mattered whether the child had been hospitalized with pneumonia or had next to no symptoms. 🧵 The study sorted the kids by how their infection went - mild/asymptomatic, severe COVID needing hospitalization, and MIS-C hyperinflammatory syndrome that shows up weeks after infection and hits several organs at once. Plus a group of healthy controls.
Jun 18 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
New study. In some people, a mild case of COVID seems to leave a hidden edit in how their cells manage their own RNA - and it doesn't fully reset once the virus is gone. Another possible clue to why some bodies don't bounce back the same. 🧵 Your DNA is the master copy. RNA is the working copy your cells actually read to build proteins. A family of enzymes called ADAR can edit letters in that working copy - swapping an A so it now reads as a G - without ever touching the DNA.
Jun 14 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Could the real trigger for Long COVID POTS be the immune system mistaking your own cells for the enemy? A new preprint makes the case that monocyte oxidative stress - not lingering virus - keeps the immune system switched on. Vanderbilt, 25 patients vs 15 recovered. 🧵 The headline finding.
Patients carry about 3× more doublets in their blood - T cells and monocytes stuck together. These used to get written off as a lab artifact. Turns out they're real, functional contacts where the cells are actively talking to each other. The body is working on something.
Jun 13 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Independent virus families - different genomes, life cycles, target tissues - keep ending up at the same two points in the brain. They switch on the same inflammation machinery, and they jam the cell's protein clean up system. If so, the damage is mostly the body's reaction, not the virus itself. 🧵 This is the core argument of a new review - one of the few that looks at post-viral brain symptoms through mechanisms shared across many viruses, instead of one virus at a time.
Jun 11 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
A multi-omics paper on long COVID in Frontiers in Immunology deserves more attention than it got. The through-line is uncomfortable - the cellular power supply stays switched off long after the acute phase is over.🧵 It's an integration of existing public datasets under one roof. Syrian hamsters (muscle, heart, kidney, lung, 8 brain regions, out to 61 days post-infection) + human cohorts - immune cells, muscle biopsies, autopsy brain, and longitudinal serum stretching to 24 months. Different tissues, different species.
Jun 11 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
How many Americans died who wouldn't have - if America were France or Japan?
The answer - 14.7 million over the past four decades.
And that number is still climbing🧵 This comes from a study published in 2025 in JAMA Health Forum (Bor et al.). The researchers compared US death rates to 21 other wealthy countries - Canada, Japan, Germany, France, the UK and more - from 1980 through 2023.
Jun 10 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
New Mayo Clinic study.
Brain hypometabolism in long COVID still showing up 2 years post-infection. This finding keeps replicating. It matters clinically. But there’s a lot worth unpacking. 🧵 Reduced brain metabolic activity in LC isn’t a one-lab quirk. Guedj 2021, a French multicenter study across three centers (n=143), pediatric case series - it keeps showing up across countries and cohorts.
Jun 9 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
A new review pulls the neurobiology of Long COVID into a pretty strong map.
Neuroinflammation here is not treated as one isolated process. It’s the place where viral persistence, glia, BBB, blood vessels, mast cells, vagus nerve, metabolism, and unstable brain networks all meet🧵 It’s an expert review - a synthesis of mechanisms, biomarkers, and possible therapeutic directions.
Jun 8 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
A genuinely interesting study.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins looked at how SARS2 infection changes the cardiac autonomic nervous system - how the heart is regulated through the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches.
It’s not one fixed state.
It’s a process.
In three phases🧵 Why does this matter?
Because dysautonomia is one of the common features of Long COVID -
palpitations, dizziness, fatigue, orthostatic intolerance, POTS etc
The autonomic nervous system helps regulate heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, digestion, the body’s ability to adapt to stress.
Jun 6 • 22 tweets • 3 min read
Viral proteins can activate the same pathways after infection that connect neuroinflammation, synapse loss, tau, alpha-synuclein, and broken cellular cleanup.
That’s why parallels with other viruses, including HIV, matter.
A new review tries to put this whole story together. 🧵 The main point is not that SARS2 has to keep massively replicating in the brain.
The authors suggest a protein-as-pathogen model.
Viral proteins themselves may act as long-term triggers, keeping nervous tissue stuck in innate immune activation, stress, and poor cellular cleanup.
Jun 5 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
Does the brain always return to baseline after COVID?
A new multimodal MRI study suggests the answer may be - not always.
After infection, some brains may remain in a different network state - and we still do not know if that state is temporary, compensatory, or maladaptive🧵 The important part is not one single MRI finding.
The strength of this study is that it combines three MRI layers
structural MRI - grey matter volume,
diffusion MRI - white-matter microstructure,
resting-state fMRI - functional connectivity.
Jun 4 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Almost one year after SARS2 infection, children with Long COVID showed measurable changes in the tiny blood vessels of the retina.
Wider arterioles.
Wider venules.
A shifted arteriole-to-venule ratio.
This was not just a symptom survey.
It was an objective microvascular signal🧵 The authors looked at retinal blood vessels in the eye - because the retina offers a non-invasive window into the body’s microcirculation.
Jun 3 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Child can recover from COVID.
Their routine tests can look normal.
Yet more sensitive testing may still detect abnormalities in the lungs, immune system, quality of life, and possibly even the heart.
A new review from Taiwan's DISCOVER cohort helps explain why🧵 This is not a single study.
It is a summary of findings from the DISCOVER program, the largest Taiwanese research project focused on pediatric Long COVID (PASC), covering more than 500 children and adolescents after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
May 31 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
This study is important because it captures a small, systematic shift in a marker of cardiac injury across the population after COVID-19.
And that is exactly the signal that can be easily missed in an individual, but may matter in public health🧵 The authors had an unusually valuable situation. People had their troponin I measured before the pandemic, and then again after a period during which some of them had SARS2 infection.
May 28 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
This new study does not matter because IgG transfer is a new concept.
But because it pulls several pieces into one mechanistic chain - Long COVID patient IgG, tissue autoreactivity, Fc-mediated immune function, small fiber damage, pain/fatigue-like pathology, and CNS activation🧵 The authors used several independent methods. Tssue staining, proteome arrays, ELISA, IgG pull-down, mass spectrometry.
They found a broad range of autoantibodies in people with Long COVID.
A striking part of the signal pointed toward the nervous system.
May 28 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Another study where long COVID does not look like a small residual problem after infection, but like broad chronic illness scattered across everyday medicine.
And that is exactly why the system often fails to see it🧵 The study analyzed data from 58 US hospitals.
The algorithm identified PASC in 16.28% of patients after COVID.
Roughly 1 in 6!
May 25 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
This paper is interesting because it identifies a concrete neurochemical signal in the CNS that connects long COVID/PASC, PEM, fatigue, and reduced physical endurance - lower activity of the central noradrenergic pathway in cerebrospinal fluid🧵 The study asked whether post-infectious ME/CFS and long COVID/PASC show measurable abnormalities in central catecholamine systems - specifically the norepinephrine and dopamine pathways.
The authors looked directly at neurochemical markers.
Not just another symptom description paper.
May 25 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
This new paper may be the most direct evidence so far that the SARS2 protein ORF3a can travel from the lungs to a distant organ through exosomes - in this case, the liver.
This is not a small detail. It may be one mechanism behind systemic COVID🧵 The point is not simply
Is the virus in this organ, yes or no?
The point is more uncomfortable
SARS2 may remain mostly in the respiratory tract, while some of its proteins travel elsewhere - and still affect distant organs.
May 21 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
This may be one of the more important long COVID papers in a while.
A new study in Frontiers in Immunology suggests that COVID can trigger new-onset insulin resistance - and that this may drive abnormal NETosis in neutrophils months after infection🧵 NETosis is the process where neutrophils release web like structures made of DNA, histones, enzymes.
Normally, this helps trap pathogens.
But when excessive, NETs can -
damage the endothelium
trigger microclots!
amplify inflammation
activate coagulation.
Exactly the kind of pathology seen in COVID.
May 21 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Important new study. ME/CFS and Long COVID are not the same thing.
Yes, they can look very similar from the outside - crushing fatigue, PEM, brain fog, dysautonomia.
But when researchers looked deeper into the immune system, the biology looked different🧵 The study compared
103 people with ME/CFS
63 people with Long COVID
41 healthy controls
They used detailed immune profiling of blood cells - especially monocytes, dendritic cells, and T-cell subsets.
May 20 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Some children with Long COVID seem to fall into the same trap as adults - and medicine still doesn’t really know how to get them out.🧵 The UK CLoCk study followed young people who had already been living with post-COVID symptoms for two years. Another 1.5 years later, most of those who responded still met the definition of post-COVID condition.