Thousands of patients are enrolling in federally funded Long COVID studies each year. Scientists say they are working with a strong sense of urgency to discover more about this complex condition.*

Long COVID crisis fuels research efforts

It’s estimated that one in five Americans with COVID-19 will develop Long COVID. Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Gary Gibbons, M.D., says the growing crisis has placed a sense of urgency on Long COVID research efforts. 

“The goal is to rapidly accelerate and advance our understanding of [Long COVID] as a means of moving toward predicting, diagnosing, treating, and preventing this disorder ultimately,” he says. 

Staggering participation

In December 2021, Congress assigned $1.5 billion to the National Health Institutes (NIH), to be doled out to different projects over a four-year span, as part of the RECOVER initiative. Since then, researchers have gathered data on over 200,000 Long COVID cases, in an effort to find key risk factors and learn more about commonly experienced symptoms.

Early results from these studies have already deepened our understanding of Long COVID. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, scientists thought that having type-2 diabetes increased a person’s chances of developing Long COVID. Thanks to the wealth of information gathered from these studies, Gibbons says it is more likely that those with Long COVID are at a higher risk of developing type-2 diabetes, instead of the other way around.

Further studies hope to answer additional questions about Long COVID, such as:

• Why do virus remnants remain in some people but not others?
• How can we better understand common Long COVID symptoms, such as brain fog, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping?
• Why/how does the virus affect basic bodily functions like body temperature regulation and heart rate?

Gibbons says the responses to these studies have reached staggering numbers, with approximately 11,000 patients enrolling each year.

“[We] are making rapid progress in building what already is the largest, most diverse, and what will be the most comprehensively defined [Long COVID] cohort in the world that exists to our knowledge.”

Finding the right answers, not just the first-available

While scientists are working quickly to discover additional insights into Long COVID, Gibbons cautions that it must be done at a pace that can still produce reliable results. “I think it’s critically important that we get the right answer, not just the quickest answer,” he says.

According to the acting director of the NIH, Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., researchers must also be willing to adjust their efforts, not only as new data emerges, but as the virus mutates.

“Somebody who was infected with the ancestral strain may look very different from somebody infected with Omicron,” he says. “That doesn’t make things any easier.”

*Rapaport, L. (2022, December 9). Long COVID Research Includes Unprecedented Patient Involvement: NIH. Medscape. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/985357