Recent Webinar: Comparing Immunological Signatures Between Long-COVID and ME/CFS

Earlier this week, I participated in a webinar hosted by the Solve ME organization (which, by the way, has loads of great resources for patients and for doctors, in addition to leading advocacy work and funding research). It was called Comparing Immunological Signatures Between Long-COVID and ME/CFS, which was of great interest to me since earlier research has indicated that immune dysfunction is at the heart of ME/CFS, and my own experiences have certainly borne that out.

You can check out the schedule of additional upcoming webinars here. On their YouTube page, there is a full playlist of all of their past webinars (see the playlist in the right sidebar). And on that page, you can watch the one I just watched, or I'll include it here:

It's an interesting talk, and they've already had some fascinating findings from the first phase of the study, looking at long-COVID patients. Much of it will be familiar to those with ME/CFS, as many of these are well-understood characteristics of our disease.

You'll hear toward the end the question that I asked, though unfortunately, the researcher didn't really understand what I was trying to get across (my fault - hard to explain through a typed comment). I do plan to follow-up with an e-mail to make sure they understand that earlier research showed a change in immunological signature between patients with ME/CFS less than three years and those sick more than three years, so this could confound their data in trying to compare long-COVID patients (by definition mostly less than three years) and pre-2020 ME/CFS patients.

They are still recruiting healthy controls and those with ME/CFS (pre-2020), so I'm sending my info to them to volunteer. Unfortunately, you have to be able to go in-person to the clinic in NYC (though if you live in the NYC area, within 50 miles of the clinic, they can provide a home visit instead).

Finally, a quick apology for not posting much here on the blog lately! I traveled a lot in April and have been pretty run-down the past two weeks. I still haven't had a full "can't get off the couch" crash since the start of the year 😀 but my energy was so low recently that I had trouble writing much. AND, we leave again tomorrow morning for my mom's for Mother's Day and her birthday. Next week, our son and his girlfriend will be staying with us and THEN, life should slow down for us for a while, and I can get back to more regular blogging.