Welcome to Running: A FEVER! My name is Michael Davis. This is a podcast about fitness, diet, and medicine. My goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life right up to the very end. And I do that by loving my life enough to make it last as long as possible, one day at a time. If any of this describes you, you’re in the right place! Come along, we’ll get there together.
As I mentioned in the last episode, these topics have been a long time coming. They were first brought up in Episode 220. Check that out at http://RunningAFEVER.com/220. That episode also mentioned a study that had just started called the CORAL study.
Officially called “The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Infants’ Coronavirus Exposure and Routine Healthcare Access in Ireland,” the study followed 365 babies born in Dublin between March and May 2020 whose parents had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. There was no vaccine available at the time. Several of the babies tested positive during the first six months of life.
Later, another group used the original CORAL cohort (312 of the infants in the first study) to evaluate behavior and development at the 24-month point. This study’s report provides more useful information. I’ll call this study CORAL2.
The CORAL cohort was compared with a BASELINE group, whose members were born between 2008 and 2011. BASELINE stands for Babies After SCOPE: Evaluating the Longitudinal Impact Using Neurological and Nutritional Impact. The results were obtained and compared using the same questionnaire for both CORAL and BASELINE.
CORAL2 stated that it was already known that babies 12 months and younger had developmental deficits. The goal of CORAL2 was to make another comparison at 24 months. The good news from the article—and by the way, the links are as usual available at http://RunningAFEVER.com/382—is that in most developmental areas, there was no significant difference between the CORAL2 and BASELINE groups at 24 months.
Remember that babies born in March 2020 or later had almost no exposure outside the home, as Ireland entered lockdown starting in March. One would expect this to have some effect on development and any effects caused by exposure to the virus. There was a marked difference in communication skills, and my gut reaction to this is to think this might be due to the lack of social interaction afforded the group.
In fact, the study mentioned that contact outside the home during this time would have been with people wearing masks, which may also have been a factor. The babies were exposed to fewer new words and perhaps to words muffled by a mask with less facial information. In addition to the poorer communication results, deficits were found in gross motor skills.
As you can tell, CORAL and CORAL2 studies seem to offer little or no information on the physical effects of someone (especially adults) having long COVID or the reasons for it. We’ll look at three more studies: PETAL-Blue CORAL, PETAL-Fire CORAL, and PETAL-RED CORAL.
PETAL stands for Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury. It’s a network of clinical centers funded by the NIH. CORAL, in these studies, stands for COVID-19 Observational Study. It is a weird acronym; they took several letters from the word “observational”.
BLUE CORAL is another weird acronym. The BLUE stands for Biology and Longitudinal Epidemiology. This word longitudinal keeps coming up. It just means studying a group of people over a period of time. The objective was to provide more accurate data on long COVID to help with care, public health, etc. Over 1300 adult patients were involved. Their health was measured using some standard surveys. Some had new heart and lung symptoms and/or financial problems, functional impairments, perceived return to baseline health, and quality of life. The upshot is that for long COVID sufferers, the prognosis was things getting worse, not better, at least at the six-month point.
FIRE CORAL focused specifically on functional, imaging, and respiratory evaluation, thus the FIRE acronym. It was an extension of the BLUE CORAL study. There were 50 participants, a subset of the BLUE CORAL group. It was a feasibility study. The data are available, but no results or conclusions.
RED CORAL. RED stands for Repository of Electronic Data. It was a review of medical records of people admitted to PETAL network hospitals for COVID. Its conclusions were that hospital mortality was associated with older age, comorbidity, and male sex. Survivors often required new health care services or respiratory support at discharge. So we learn nothing new from this study either.
To summarize, the main things we get from all of these studies are that:
1. The scientists working on long covid really like obscure acronyms.
2. Long COVID patients may get worse or stay the same, but they don’t seem to get better. In other words, long COVID could be for life.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this foray in the scientific world of the study of long COVID. If you want to “dive deeper” into CORAL, check out the links in the show notes at http://RunningAFEVER.com/382. And remember, if you’ve got the fever, keep it burning. And if you don’t, catch the fever, and I will see you next time on Running: A FEVER.
References:
https://biolincc.nhlbi.nih.gov/studies/petal_blue_coral/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8420242/
https://adc.bmj.com/content/108/10/846
https://biolincc.nhlbi.nih.gov/studies/petal_fire_coral/