TLC Sessions - Living with Long Covid TLC Sessions

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 the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion, but with the chronic condition proving more prevalent and prolonged than originally estimated, those figu...

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 efforts into Long Covid research and treatment. In an insightful overview she describes her work in understanding the mechanisms (viral persi...

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-exertional malaise (PEM), or “the worsening of fatigue- and pain-related symptoms after acute mental or physical exercise”. In this week’...

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 episode he discusses the autonomic issues faced by Long Covid patients including migraine, which he believes is prevalent in c. 50% of patients, ...

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 overlapping symptom sets that render people debilitated with all three conditions. He describes the various ways in which are body is not able to...

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 Long Covid patients. In this week’s episode, Abramoff talks us through the findings of their study, the hypothesis of what drives the depleti...