The Cheap Antidepressant That Can Help vs Long COVID

Long COVID is a persistent threat, and it’s something affecting many people long after the popular media has stopped talking about it so much.

See for example: Long COVID Persistence and Surveillance Gaps Across 58 US Hospitals and, for that matter: Why Women Are 3x More Likely To Get Severe Long COVID.

On which note, regular 10almonds readers may remember this interesting guest article: Can you die from long COVID? The answer is not so simple

Actually, the answer is quite simple:

• In practical terms, it’s “yes”.
• In pedantic terms, it’s much like how technically nobody dies of AIDS (one gets AIDS, one’s immune system flatlines, and then one dies of pneumonia, or flu, or a cold, or something like that).
  • So, on the books, people aren’t directly dying of long COVID, they’re dying of other things because they have long COVID which has compromised their ability to deal with the other things.
  • In that paper we linked up top, for example, among the 74,560 identified long COVID cases, 66,587 people (89.31%) developed at least one chronic condition requiring ongoing management.

See also: falling doesn’t kill anyone!

What kills people is other events that transpire after falling (i.e., starting from when you stop falling).

So, what’s this about reducing its effects?

So long, COVID

Researchers (Dr. Daniela Carla Medeiros Silva et al.) found that fluvoxamine, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, significantly reduced fatigue and improved quality of life in people with long COVID, making it one of the first medications to show meaningful benefits for this condition.

Not the only medication! We wrote previously about: How Metformin Reduces Long COVID Risk By 63%

And even supplements can help: NAD⁺ vs Long COVID! ← there are caveats with this one though, as NAD⁺ is difficult to effectively supplement, and can often be more efficiently boosted indirectly.

Back to the recent study, it was a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial (RCT) involving 399 adults who experienced persistent fatigue after confirmed COVID infection.

Participants were randomly assigned to receive fluvoxamine, or metformin, or a placebo.

The results, in numbers:

❝Fluvoxamine showed a significant reduction in fatigue compared with placebo at day 60 (mean difference, −0.43 [95% credible interval {CrI}, −0.80 to −0.07]), with a sustained effect at day 90 (mean difference, −0.58 [CrI, −0.98 to −0.16]). Fluvoxamine also improved quality-of-life scores with high posterior probability. Metformin showed no significant benefit. Adverse events were less frequent with fluvoxamine (20.0%) than with metformin (28.8%) or placebo (29.7%).❞

In other words, people taking fluvoxamine experienced 50–60% greater reductions in fatigue than those taking a placebo.

With regard to “Metformin showed no significant benefit”, you may be thinking “what? I thought you said earlier…” and the key difference is that in what we wrote about before, the study was looking at how metformin reduces the risk of developing long COVID—not whether it helps if taken when one already has long COVID.

You can read the paper in full, here: The Effect of Fluvoxamine and Metformin for Fatigue in Patients With Long COVID: An Adaptive Randomized Trial

Want to do more?

Check out:

What Can Be Done About Long COVID? ← scientists have found a possible cure, a procedure known as epipharyngeal abrasive therapy, which as enjoyable as it sounds, and is not yet proven to cure it completely (although to give it its due, the science so far really is promising)

Take care!