Dr Benjamin Krishna and the Virology & Immunology team at Cambridge University have identified a protein, elevated in the blood of Long Covid patients, that could act as a potential biomarker for the condition. This week, we spoke to Dr Krishna about their study, published in Science, which sampled the blood of Long Covid patients across several ye…

Dr Theoharis Theoharides, aka “The Mast Cell Master”, has been exploring the world of Mast Cells, their influence on our bodily functions, neurology and genetic make up, for over half a century. The Director of the Center of Excellence for Neuroinflammation Research and Professor at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine at Nova Southeastern Unive…

Conor Browne, an independent Biorisk Consultant, analyses biosecurity risks for governmental bodies, commercial enterprises and NGOs, aiding with business continuity, forecasting and policy. He understood that Covid-19 was airborne in February 2020 but, he says, “it’s the first message that sticks”. In this week’s episode he discusses how our gover…

David Cutler, Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, has spent his career assessing the economics of healthcare. Over the past four years he has applied his skills to assessing the cost of Covid, and subsequently Long Covid, on the U.S. economy. His original analysis, published in JAMA in 2022, suggested that Long Covid would cost th…

Dr Nancy Klimas, Director of the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine, Nova Southeastern University, is an immunologist internationally renowned for her work in multi-symptom illnesses. In this week’s episode she explains her work, from HIV through ME/CFS and Gulf War Syndrome, that has led to her having insight and an amazing team to channel effort…

Dr Rob Wüst, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Movement and Behaviour Sciences, is an expert cardiac and skeletal muscle metabolism and mitochondrial function. He and the team at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, published the “PEM study” in Nature Communications, which investigated the muscular changes in Long Covid patients who experience post-e…

Dr Thomas Chelimsky, Professor of Neurology and Director of VCU’s autonomic laboratory, is a specialist in autonomic dysfunction and a vocal advocate for considering the mind and body as one cohesive system. He, along with his team at the VCU clinic, take a unique brain-body approach to treating Long Covid patients, with success. In this week’s epi…

Dr Andrew Klein, an anaesthetist at the Royal Papworth Hospital Cambridge, runs the Cambridge Iron Clinic where he treats people with Iron and B12 deficiencies. Since the start of Covid he has seen an increase in people with these deficiencies, many of whom have been diagnosed with Long Covid. In this episode Dr Klein talks us through the overlappi…

Physiatrist Benjamin Abramoff, M.D. is the Director and Co-founder of the Post Covid Assessment and Recovery Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. An Assistant Professor in Physical Medicine and Rehabilition, Abramoff used his expertise to co-author the study, published in Cell, that found that serotonin depletion is prevalent in …

Tim Henrich is a Professor of Medicine and expert in infectious diseases, focused on chronic viral infections at the University of California, San Francisco. He is another member of the titan Long Covid research team who have tracked patients since the beginning of the pandemic (LIINC study) and are making roads into understanding the mechanism of …

A supplement to Episode 68 - Consultant Neurologist Steven Allder of Re:Cognition Health discusses the way that injury to the brain causes anxiety and depression in Traumatic Brain Injury and could explain some of the mental health impact of Long Covid. Living with Long Covid? How was your week? Website - https://www.tlcsessions.net/ Twitter - @Ses…

A supplement to Episode 68 - Consultant Neurologist Steven Allder of Re:Cognition Health explains what tinnitus is and why we are experiencing it in Long Covid. Living with Long Covid? How was your week? Website - https://www.tlcsessions.net/ Twitter - @SessionsTlc https://twitter.com/sessionstlc Insta - @tlcsessions https://www.instagram.com/tlcse…

Consultant Neurologist Steven Allder of Re:Cognition Health has applied his wealth of experience investigating Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) to understanding the impact of Long Covid on the brain. In this week’s conversation we discuss inflammation of the brain of Long Covid patients which is visible using …

Professor Andrew Shaw, University of Exeter, believes that he has devised a diagnostic test for Long Covid. His company, Attomarker, have developed a test which can reveal a gap in a patient’s antibody spectrum – their response to acute SARS-COV2 from a finger prick of blood. This gap, he says, has lead to a viral residue that causes the chronic sy…

Imperial College Professor of Immunology, Danny Altmann recently published “The immunology of long COVID”, a fantastically comprehensive overview in Nature Reviews Immunology. In this week’s episode Altmann, to whom we first spoke in the summer of 2021, talks us through some of the highlights of the work he's reviewed - serotonin depletion, gut bio…

Dr. Amy Proal is the President and Research Director of PolyBio Research Foundation, a non-profit organisation that brings together some of the brightest scientific minds to research how infection-associated chronic conditions are studied, diagnosed and treated. Their work into Long Covid is bringing together some of the leaders in the field to acc…

Michael Peluso M.D., an HIV and infectious disease specialist at UCSF, has been studying Long Covid patients since April 2020 (LIINC Study). This, along with his history of working with HIV and other viruses, has given him the knowledge and methods to make some break-throughs into Long Covid pathogenesis, effects and, potentially, treatments. He, a…

Eric Topol must be one of the leading voices in Long Covid advocacy. Cardiologist, scientist, author, editor-in-chief of Medscape, and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Topol has written about Long Covid in publications from The Lancet and Nature, to The Washington Post. As a clinician a large proportion of his patients are n…

Harlan Krumholtz, cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at Yale University, is attempting to move the needle when it comes to patient-centric care in Long Covid and beyond. Working closely with immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, Krumholz not only looks at the heart when it comes to his research into Long Covid. Together this Long Covid power couple are t…

Credited as being the founder of functional medicine, Dr Leo Galland has spent the past 40 years trying to create a patient-centred version of healthcare. Using pharmaceuticals, supplements, lifestyle and complimentary therapies he has drawn on his vast knowledge of patients and holistic healing, to create a comprehensive protocol for Long Covid pa…

Researcher Vicky van der Togt and virologist Dr Jeremy Rossman have spent the past 2.5 years trying to help Long Covid patients and research via their organisation Research-Aid Networks. Their latest paper, published in Frontiers, hypothesises that it is an acid-base disruption that drives the symptomatology of Long Covid. In this week's episode we…

Dr Wes Ely, a pulmonary and critical care doctor, has built a remarkable resource for Long Covid sufferers within the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, of which he is co-director. A professor, using his knowledge of his clinical knowledge and his extensive re…

Molecular Virologist, Bhupesh Prusty, promised to reveal more when we last spoke, four weeks ago. Here he presents what he believes to be a biomarker for Long Covid, explaining the mechanism, its similarity to ME/CFS, what his research and findings have proven, and how we might take this research forward to develop further understanding and treatme…

Lavanya Visvabharathy, a T cell immunologist at Northwestern University, Chicago, has led extensive studies into Long Covid, but we learned that some of those studies, despite their merit and rigour, were proving hard to publish in top tier medical journals. In this week's episode we lift the lid on the process of scientific publishing, talking thr…

Dr Jim Jackson, research professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, does not believe that Long Covid is all in your mind, but he has found that treating the brain, as if it has a brain injury, can help Long Covid recovery. In this week’s episode Dr Jackson explains his clinical experience of the neurological impac…

Dr Raouf (Ron) Gharbo has spent many years treating those with brain injury and autonomic disorders using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) metrics. Physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist, and Director of Autonomic Rehabilitation at VMU Health, Dr Gharbo this week explains the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the metrics he uses…

Dr Bhupesh Prusty believes that he has found 'the switch'. A molecular virologist from the University of Würzburg, Germany, he has turned his work looking at ME/CFS to look at Long Covid, and believes that viral reactivation in both diseases could hold the key. It’s this viral reactivation that, rather than causing a detectable elevation of somethi…

In this week's episode we receive no-nonsense, practical advice from Prof. Jack Lambert, a consultant in infectious diseases at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. He has been monitoring long term recovery following COVID-19 since he saw the first patients in Ireland in March 2020. He has used his knowledge of chronic conditions caused by other infectiou…

If you’re looking for an overview of all of the research into Long Covid, this Nature review, undertaken by Patient Led Research Collaborative (PLRC) under the guidance of the cardiologist Dr Eric Topol, is a great place to start. A collation of the findings from almost 300 biomedical research papers on Long Covid, it sets out the major findings, m…

Akiko Iwasaki, a Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, with a particular interest in mucosal infection, is making gains in Long Covid research. Her work with Dr David Putrino (interviewed in Episode 47) revealed several findings that move us closer to identifying a bio-marker; her work wit…

Dr Ziyad Al-Aly is chief of research and development at the Veteran Affairs St. Louis healthcare system and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Direct access to both Long Covid patients and the Veteran Affairs health care records enables Al-Aly to have led some of the most impactful research and studies into Long Covid.…

Dr Benjamin Natelson, professor of neurology and director of the Pain and Fatigue Study Centre at Mount Sinai, has been studying the mechanisms, effects and management of chronic fatigue for almost half a century. In this week’s conversation he explains how he has used his knowledge to study and treat those with Long Covid. The recipient of multipl…

What if there were an activity tracking app designed to monitor and aid recovery from chronic illness, instead of pushing fitness goals? That is exactly what Long Covid sufferer Harry Leeming conceived with his team at Visible. Together they have created an activity tracking platform specifically for Long Covid and ME / CFS sufferers to enable them…

This week, we spoke to Mount Sinai neuroscientist and physical therapist Dr. David Putrino about his latest study on 215 patients. A collaboration between Mount Sinai and Yale University in the U.S., Putrino worked with immunologist Akiko Iwasaki to see if they could find any ‘Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profilin…

Dr David Strain is a titan in the Long Covid research and clinical field. With the ability to boil down complex medical theory and research into very comprehensible explanations, Dr Strain explains HRV and how we can use it to monitor and potentially manage our symptoms. He talks us through vagal tone, the impact of vaccines and COVID-19 strains on…

Amiad Abrahams, a Health Psychologist, the Deputy Lead for North West London's Long Covid Psychology service, understands the effect that the mind and Mindfulness can have on patients with acute and chronic conditions. Since mid 2020 he has been leading “COMFORT” – a group Mindfulness course offered by St Mary’s Hospital. In this week’s episode he …

Professor Doug Kell is a systems biologist who has been studying anomalous clotting for many years, and since the pandemic began has turned his knowledge, working alongside Prof. Resia Pretorius, to explore the theory of microclots in Long Covid patients. In this week's episode Prof. Kell explains to us the way in which these clots form, his theori…

Dr Tae Chung runs the POTS clinic at John Hopkins University. Approaching this with his two specialties- neuromuscular and physical medicine and rehabilitation - he treats POTS patients, and those with Long Covid POTS, with a combination of functional exercises, alongside blood volume expansion and medication. In this week's episode he talks to us …

With the established medical system offering few options to treat Long Covid holistically - most sufferers are at best only being offered symptom management - many are turning to alternative therapies. This week we spoke to Joachim Gerlach, chairman of Vedicinals, who have developed the nutraceutical Vedicinals9 for the treatment of acute and Long …

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding was one of the first public health scientists to raise the alarm as COVID-19 took hold. Often several steps ahead of the policy-makers, Feigl-Ding shares with us his view that Long Covid looks to be an immuno-compromised state, not dissimilar to that caused by HIV. Could this explain other current outbreaks - summer flu, monkeypo…

Dr Bettina Hohberger, an ophthalmologist at Erlangen University with expertise in glaucoma, believes that looking at the eye – an area of the body where the blood vessels are visible – is representative of the rest of the human body. She has seen that there is a change in blood vessel density in the eye of her patients with Long Covid and believes …

Lavanya Visvabharathy, a T cell immunologist, has methodically applied her expertise to look at samples from patients at the Long Covid clinic at North Western University in Chicago, to try and establish the mechanism driving the disease. Her personal experience of Long Covid's effects and the role of autoimmunity - she has both Long Covid and rheu…

The Long Covid space has been abuzz with talk of Tollovid - the dietary supplement that is claimed to act, in much the same way as Paxlovid, on inhibiting 3CL protease. We wanted to get some clear answers on how this supplement works, the potential benefits, and its safety profile. We spoke to CEO of Todos Medical, Gerald Commissiong, who has broug…

Dr Stephen Griffin, virologist and member of Independent SAGE, talks us through the workings of antivirals - both in acute COVID-19 and in Long Covid. He explains what antivirals do - suppressing the virus rather than removing it from our systems - and suggests that the use of one course of individual antivirals might not be the holy grail that Lon…

Dr Alec Schmaier, a cardiology and vascular specialist, has studied the impact that COVID-19 has on the endothelium. This week we called on his knowledge of the vascular system and coagulation issues to talk us through the potential role of the endothelium in Long Covid. We wanted to take a step back and look at why clotting might be playing a role…

In Long Covid it can be hard to keep up with what we should be eating, not eating, supplementing and changing when it comes to providing our bodies with the correct nutrition to optimise recovery. This week Professor of Dietetics, Mary Hickson, provides us with some down-to-earth advice about how diet affects and is affected by Long Covid, dispels …

Not only do many Long Covid patients suffer from P.O.T.S or P.O.T.S-like symptoms, but there are a number of similarities between the two conditions and their management. The cross-over of symptoms - from breathlessness, palpitations, and chest discomfort, to fatigue, pain, brain fog, sleep disturbance and orthostatic intolerance - is remarkable. S…

Perry Nickelston believes that focusing on the much overlooked lymphatic system could be what we each need to enable our bodies to heal. In this week’s episode Nickelston, chiropractor and holistic health coach, talks us through the role of the lymphatic system and explains how it could be what is holding us back from recovering from chronic diseas…

There may be a treatment from which a third of women with Long Covid could benefit. It is not a new drug, it is safe, and it has been proven to work anecdotally. And yet there are no clinical trials looking at HRT as a potential treatment for the largest cohort of Long Covid sufferers. In our patriarchal medical system many women are not even being…

A Professor of Medicine in residence at the University of California, San Francisco, Steven Deeks M.D., is an expert on HIV-associated immune dysfunction. Using his 30 years of experience researching viral illness, Deeks has turned his hand to the study of the long term impacts of COVID-19 on our immune systems. The parallels that he draws between …