News: New long COVID trials start, ongoing study shows adverse events after COVID and vaccine

The National Institutes of Health recently announced the first two of the RECOVER initiative’s long COVID clinical trials are now underway and open for enrollment. The first study, called RECOVER-NEURO, will investigate interventions for long COVID cognitive dysfunction by testing therapies such as transcranial direct current stimulation. The second study, RECOVER-VITAL, will target viral persistence with its first intervention testing a long regimen of the antiviral nirmatrelvir/ritonavir (Paxlovid). Two other trials, RECOVER-SLEEP and RECOVER-AUTONOMIC, will also launch soon, MedPage Today reported.

The study will follow a platform protocol to test multiple targeted therapies within it. “Recognizing that more than one solution is likely needed, we've taken the lessons learned from RECOVER participants to design rigorous clinical trial platforms that will identify treatments for persons with different symptom clusters to improve their function and well-being,” said Walter Koroshetz, MD, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In other long COVID related news, The ongoing “LISTEN” study of long COVID led by Yale University researchers recently expanded its population to include people with persistent adverse events after COVID vaccine (sometimes called “long vax”) in hopes of matching abnormal post-vaccine symptoms with corresponding immune respondents. They have used questionnaire data and blood and saliva samples to collect data for their findings from about 2,100 participants with either long COVID or post-vaccination symptoms.

“We were developing the LISTEN study to better characterize long COVID using clinical, patient-generated, and patient-reported information and, for a subset, to conduct deep immunophenotyping,” Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, one of the researchers of Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, said in an interview with MedPage Today. “Around that time, we also became aware that there were people who were reporting a chronic syndrome, with many similar symptoms after receiving vaccination," he said. "These people were not political and not anti-vaccination—they had all been vaccinated—but seemed to have symptoms that were persistent and debilitating.”

Studies have largely shown that risk of post-vaccine events do not exceed background rates and a new diagnosis from symptoms is more likely to be given to post-COVID patients than after vaccination. But both patients with long COVID and with post-vaccine symptoms have reported feeling dismissed by clinicians, especially as conventional testing has failed to identify a cause.

Editor’s note: To read MedPage Today’s coverage of the story on new long COVID trials, click here. To read MedPage Today’s coverage of the story on post-vaccine symptoms, click here. To learn more about the RECOVER studies, click here. To learn more about the LISTEN study, click here.