As more studies on the causes of Long Covid come out, one thing is becoming increasingly clear, something that I’ve pointed out many times over the past several years. The term “Long Covid” potentially covers over 200 symptoms but no universal clinical case definition exists.
Those of us suffering from Long Covid – including myself – can’t undergo a non-existent test to diagnose the condition and many don’t know what to do about their symptoms. Nor in many cases do their physicians.
We do know that there are several symptoms that appear more often than others. These include severe chronic fatigue, cognitive impairments, skeletal-muscular issues, and gastrointestinal symptoms. Clearly, many different organ systems are involved.
Long Covid has been an umbrella for all of these symptoms but only as far as taxonomists may be concerned, certainly not for those treating patients or those suffering from it.
There is a clear need to create a better taxonomy here, perhaps subgroups or even a nomenclature using an alphabet (take your pick, the world has some 100 pure alphabets although 99% of the world’s pure alphabets come from just a handful of alphabets and scripts, including Latin, used for German, English, French, Hungarian, and many other languages; Cyrillic, used for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and other tongues; Arabic, used for Arabic and Persian, among others; Chinese, used for Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Chinese languages; and Devanagari, used for Hindi and Nepali, among others).
If we truly want to disassociate and disentangle the conditions, we could easily adopt a system that calls the disparate Long Covid conditions Long Covid A, Long Covid B, Long Covid, C, and so on.
It’s quite unlikely all Long Covid symptoms are caused by the same agent, something observationally proven by the fact that some patients are able to recover while others cannot.
In the meantime, the longer we wait to test out the use of subtypes or endotypes for Long Covid, the more we dig ourselves into a hole that the current umbrella term of Long Covid is not big enough to cover.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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