Are you one of the almost 1 billion people who contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus?
At least 10% of all people who got COVID don't recover and develop an illness virtually identical to myalgic encephalomyelitis. Many remain seriously disabled and unable to get back to their usual activities like work, parenting, and hobbies.
Harvard professor, Dr. Anthony Komaroff was one of the first to recognize that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would lead to a surge of ME-like chronic disease. He has been at the forefront of reviewing the long COVID literature to identify what is happening at the cellular and organ level in people with long COVID. The findings for long COVID are so similar to ME that we can see that post-infection syndromes share a lot in common.
In this session you will learn:
- ME and long COVID real: there are many measurable abnormalities in the body including:
- Central nervous system symptoms like fatigue, headache and problems thinking clearly and quickly;
- Autonomic nervous system symptoms like postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS);
- Low cellular energy causing severe fatigue and post-exertional malaise;
- Reactivation of viral infections;
- Disturbances to the gut microbiome causing irritable bowel symptoms and generalized inflammation;
- Cardiovascular and pulmonary system including increased heart rate, shortness of breath and decreased exercise capacity;
- Central nervous system symptoms like fatigue, headache and problems thinking clearly and quickly;
- ME and long COVID pose a huge financial cost to society. Funds to research these disabling conditions could pay off several fold.
- Dr. Komaroff's belief that evolutionarily preserved sickness behavior plays a central role in the cause of ME and long COVID.
This recording is approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes in length.
- 5 minutes of introductions
- 40 minute presentation
- 25 minutes of Q&A
This presentation is part of Dr. Stein's new Expert Speakers Series. These will be held approximately monthly and each session will feature a different guest expert on topics of interest to people with a chronic complex disease, a chronic disease in general, and people interested in living healthier longer.
ALL presentations in the Expert Speakers Series are free with a membership to Live! with Dr. Stein
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About the Presenters
Dr. Anthony Komaroff
Simcox-Clifford-Higby Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Komaroff is one of the most well known and respected people in the ME field. As a young researcher, he was the first person called into the Incline Nevada outbreak in the 1980s a call that ended up defining his career.
He was a co-author of the Holmes and Fukuda criteria for ME/CFS. And more recently he was a coauthor of the Diagnosis and management paper in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Dr. Komaroff led seminal research showing that ME/CFS is associated with more disability than other diseases like cancer and MS, work that lent credibility to the disease.
When COVID happened, he was one of the first to call the alarm bells that an ME-like syndrome (now known as long COVID) would likely occur. With co-author, Dr. Ian Lipkin, Dr. Komaroff has written important papers comparing ME with long COVID.
Dr. Komaroff will talk about the similarity between ME and long COVID with focus on the research findings–all of which validate that ME and LC are legitimate biomedical diseases deserving attention and funding.
Dr. Eleanor Stein
Dr. Stein is a physician and psychiatrist, an expert in helping people with ME/CFS, FM, environmental sensitivities, long COVID, and chronic pain recover their health and joy in life.
Through her own 35-year illness journey, reading thousands of scientific papers and working with thousands of patients, she has developed a unique, science-based approach to healing from chronic pain called Healing Through Neuroplasticity. This course teaches core strategies to rewire the brain for more comfort and better function.
