About a year ago a student of mine who had to take a break from studies due to Long Covid sat down with me to compare what they’d learned from a Long Covid clinic.
Let me back up. After I got Covid, while the worst of it faded, the fuzzy, logy, hard to focus mental ‘fog’ (and what a minimizing description ‘fog’ is for this, it’s like mental debilitation) that came with it (what you get with a long flu, or that slowness you feel when you have a horrible viral infection but are still working) just never went away.
It got to the point where I learned symbolic logical statements so I could use a piece of paper to reason through complicated subjects because I couldn’t process it in my head on the fly like I have for most of my life.
The first break I had was treating the brain fog like a traumatic brain injury. In fact, taking NAC and guanfacine was the first moment I stopped feeling like I was mentally drowning (see NIH article about combining NAC and guanfacine for TBI here) and got me to treading water.
It took a year to find that combo, and after months of it, I felt like I could start piecing some life back together.
In that first year walking left me gasping and winded at times. My single flight of stairs up to the bedroom some nights required me to pull myself up with the handrail when tired because my legs would feel wobbly enough I worried about being a fall risk. But as my head started to clear a bit, things slowly, slowly, improved. I started walking to work again.
But I wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, back to anything near normal. I was just able to muddle through.
My doctor and I tried a few other things after the guanfacine/NAC combo, hoping to get me out past just treading water and to thriving. Nothing worked as well as g/NAC.
Until I sat down with that student, and they ran through some of the things they’d heard about. And then they said “but what saved my life was LDN.”
“What’s LDN?”
According to a couple of Long Covid clinic program directors I’ve emailed with, a sizable number of patients are having positive results from low-dose naltrexone.
Naltrexone is a drug that is usually used for alcohol and opioid addicts. At the 50-80mg level, it interferes with the pleasure pathways. But what is also interesting about it is that it is also a really good anti-inflammatory.
At the 3-4.5mg level, people are taking it off-label to ‘lengthen life’ by reducing inflammation. It’s also being used off-label by doctors to tackle persistent inflammation. And several researchers I’ve talked to think that Long Covid is a persistent post-viral infection: ie those of us with Long Covid never really beat it, it’s still lurking down in the atomic level fucking with our chemistry and causing inflammation.
In the brain.
Which is why you can’t think.
I started LDN when I got back from Scotland in January. I very, very slowly titrated up from .5mg a day in January, to 1.5mg in early February, to 3mg in early March, and in mid March I finally hit 4.5mg.
I’ve made no other medicinal changes, and I would say about 60-70% of the brain fog is gone now. I’ve only been at 4.5mg for the last couple weeks, but I’ve done more in the last two weeks than I have in the last year or two.
I’m a little overtired today, I may have overdone it.
But people are starting to comment “you seem energetic” or “you seem more talkative” or “you seem like you’re more on top of things.”
Yes. All true.
If you are struggling with Long Covid, LDN is no guarantee. The number I have been given anecdotally was 50% of patients seem to respond at some level to it. But if you have this beast, you know that even a coin flip is worth checking into.
LDN studies and scientific sources:
Low-dose Naltrexone Improves post-COVID-19 condition Symptoms: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38267326
Low-dose naltrexone and NAD+ for the treatment of patients with persistent fatigue symptoms after COVID-19: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10862402/
New Study Supports Using Naltrexone to Treat Long Covid: https://solvecfs.org/new-study-supports-using-naltrexone-to-treat-long-covid/ (this study said 3/4!)
That should be enough to get you started to talk to doctors. I don’t think it’s a cure, if it’s post-viral, we’re still infected, and there’s probably going to have to be some sort of anti-viral combination (much like AIDs cocktails) to beat this out of us.
But LDN has given me my brain back in the last two weeks.
And I’m so grateful. It’s been a long, dark, exhausting two years since I first got sick.
Same.
I got lucky and found a long covid doc that is a neurologist that used to specialize in treating TBI. After the initial visits he got me onto LDN and that helped so much.
That’s awesome you got help fast. And glad LDN is helping you as well!
Just started LDN
Crossing fingers for you. I ran out due to a mistake on my prescription (they filled 30 instead of 90) and on day four off it I felt a shift back to muddled. Happy to be back on.