The National Institutes of Health announced Wednesday that it was awarding nearly $ 470 million to New York University’s Langone Health for research into the long-term effects of COVID-19 to drive an unprecedented national effort to study the so-called “long COVID”.
Federal money will be distributed by NYU to fund more than 100 researchers at institutions across the country, accelerating work to build a strong “meta-cohort” that includes thousands of COVID-19 survivors of various ages and backgrounds still experiencing symptoms more than one month after the initial infection.
“The only way to fix this is with very extensive studies that collect a lot and a lot of information about symptoms, physical findings and laboratory measurements,” NIH director Dr. Francis Collins.
Some COVID “long carriers” report struggling with debilitating symptoms such as extreme fatigue, headaches, dizziness, “brain fog,” and difficulty breathing for months after the initial infection. Doctors are not sure what causes it. One theory is that traces of the virus may continue to “hide” in the body, while others believe it may result from overloading the immune system.
The program, dubbed the RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) initiative, was first announced in February by the NIH, through a fund of money that scientists had sought from Congress to investigate risk factors, incidence and results of long COVID.
Some of the studies that will report on the data of the initiative are already underway. The NIH had already awarded funding to New York University and Massachusetts General Hospital to build the “infrastructure” of the effort, coordinating studies and organizing project data.
Enrollment in the initiative’s new studies is expected to begin in the coming months, the researchers said, with the goal of adding between 30,000 and 40,000 people.
This is several times greater than the 5,000 to 8,000 people who are normally included in this type of cohort study, said Dr. Gary Gibbons, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
“We’re being a lot more ambitious here. And starting this, starting it, trying to achieve goals over the next 12 to 18 months after the appropriation. So this is really moving at a fast pace, compared to most scale cohorts, “Gibbons added.
“Very soon we had no answers,” Hannah Davis, who has championed the investigation for fellow survivors with a long COVID, told CBSN. earlier this month.
Sick from the first wave of the virus in March 2020, Davis said she had experienced ongoing neurological symptoms after her infection. Others have reported a wide range of effects, including fevers that last more than a year, Davis said.
“We still see a lot of researchers focusing only on the symptoms. What are the symptoms of the long COVID? We’ve been through this. We need to start treating ourselves and pathophysiology,” he said.
The RECOVER cohort does not plan to study specific treatments for long-term COVID in the current phase of the effort, but the researchers said it could lay the groundwork for future findings.
“We hope to identify therapeutic targets and plan to use some of the same infrastructures that exist for this observational study for future clinical trials,” said Dr. Stuart Katz of New York University.
Among the first questions researchers hope to answer in study participants is the debugging of the very definition of long COVID, according to Katz.
Data on the frequency of long-term effects of COVID-19 vary widely, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which ranges from 5% to 80% of infections. These studies depend to a large extent on how scientists defined what symptoms were considered true cases of long COVID.
Earlier this month, the CDC reported survey data where two out of three respondents who tested positive for the virus had symptoms more than four weeks after the initial infection.
“If it’s the case that 10 to 30 percent of people will have some kind of long-term COVID, we’re talking about millions of people,” Collins said.
Researchers abroad have also stepped up efforts to study the long-term effects of COVID-19, with a recent effort in the UK that people vaccinated with advanced cases of the disease were less likely to report long-term symptoms of COVID than unvaccinated individuals.
“One of the really worrying aspects of this terrible pandemic could be the persistence of this long tail of effect on people who are unable to return to their pre-infection state, and we must do everything we can to get answers to that. “Collins said.