Ok after talking with hubby some more, Covid test is bc he mentioned Covid, we think. He can’t smell. Hasn’t been able to for almost a year. It’s like my cough which I’ve had for 6 years being called Covid.
Did he have covid a year ago, or just spontaneously lose his sense of smell, or something else?
My wife had an appointment with a pulmonologist a few months ago, where they required a rapid test before administering a breathing test.
At her PCP, they are requiring rapid tests before entry if you present symptoms that could be COVID. She has a chronic cough, so…
Granted, it was pre-delta, but I saw my PCP and told them I had a sore throat, and wasn’t tested.
He had me take off my mask so he could peer down my throat, and offered a non-covid diagnosis (which was probably correct.)
Yes, officially diagnosed Sep 15.
He mostly doesn’t seem bothered by not smelling, unlike another person I know who has dealt with it for longer who seems to be limited in what she can eat bc it’s not just no smell but weird smells.
He has also had some weird dementia like episodes. Again, he didn’t think about it. But when I pointed out that this was going on since January at least, and that I’d worry about early onset dementia if not for Covid, that kind of shook him up.
His lack of sleep could be apnea. The brain fog could be stress but the smell thing couldn’t be anything else, I don’t think.
I went in for an earache and allergy symptoms and no test. But she did ask me a bunch of questions that may have been covid screening or may have been her doing her job. And she told me she’d had other patients that got Delta after a previous bout of Covid.
Interesting, as my wife said there was a cricket in the house, yet I couldn’t hear it. Then, she records it on her phone, and I can hear THAT.
Could be my aging, though.
That is a problem in the mid-50’s. Everything could be aging.
That and loud concerts.
Kids these days with their raucous music 
There are other things that can cause loss of smell, but with his confirmed case & Occam’s razor & all…
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
Since the beginning of the pandemic, doctors have found that people who become very ill with COVID-19 often experience kidney problems, not just the lung impairments that are the hallmark of the illness.
Now, a large study suggests that kidney issues can last for months after patients recover from the initial infection and may lead to a serious lifelong reduction of kidney function in some patients.
The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, found that the sicker COVID patients were initially, the more likely they were to experience lingering kidney damage.
But even people with less severe initial infections could be vulnerable.
“You see really, across the board, a higher risk of a bunch of important kidney-associated events,” said Dr. F. Perry Wilson, a nephrologist and associate professor of medicine at Yale, who was not involved in the study. “And what was particularly striking to me was that these persisted.”
Kidneys play a vital role in the body, clearing toxins and excess fluid from the blood, helping maintain a healthy blood pressure, and keeping a balance of electrolytes and other important substances. When the kidneys are not working properly or efficiently, fluids build up, leading to swelling, high blood pressure, weakened bones and other problems.
The heart, lungs, central nervous system and immune system can become impaired. In end-stage kidney disease, dialysis or an organ transplant may become necessary. The condition can be fatal.
The new study, based on records of patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, analyzed data from 89,216 people who tested positive for the coronavirus between March 1, 2020, and March 15, 2021, as well as data from 1,637,467 people who were not COVID patients.
Between one and six months after becoming infected, COVID survivors were about 35% more likely than non-COVID patients to have kidney damage or substantial declines in kidney function, said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of the research and development service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and senior author of the study.
“People who have survived the first 30 days of COVID are at risk of developing kidney disease,” said Al-Aly, a nephrologist and assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine.
Because many people with reduced kidney function do not experience pain or other symptoms, “what’s really important is that people realize that the risk is there and that physicians caring for post-COVID patients really pay attention to kidney function and disease,” he said.
The two sets of patients in the study differed, in that members of one group had all been infected with COVID and members of the other group may have had a variety of other health conditions. Experts cautioned that there were limitations to the comparisons.
The researchers tried to minimize the differences with detailed analyses that adjusted for a long list of demographic characteristics, preexisting health conditions, medication usage and whether people were in nursing homes.
Another limitation is that patients in the VA study were largely male and white, with a median age of 68, so it is unclear how generalizable the results are.
One strength of the research, experts said, is that it involves over 1.7 million patients with detailed electronic medical records, making it the largest study so far on COVID-related kidney problems.
While the results most likely would not apply to all COVID patients, they show that for those in the study, “there’s a pretty notable impact on kidney health in survivors of COVID-19 over the long term, particularly those who were very sick during their acute illness,” said Dr. C. John Sperati, a nephrologist and associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study.
Other researchers have found similar patterns, “so this is not the only study suggesting that these events are transpiring after COVID-19 infection,” he added.
He and other experts said that if even a small percentage of the millions of COVID survivors in the United States developed lasting kidney problems, the impact on health care would be great.
To assess kidney function, the research team evaluated levels of creatinine, a waste product that kidneys are supposed to clear from the body, as well as a measure of how well the kidneys filter the blood called the estimated glomerular filtration rate.
Healthy adults gradually lose kidney function over time, about 1% or less a year, starting in their 30s or 40s, Wilson said. Serious illnesses and infections can cause more profound or permanent loss of function that may lead to chronic kidney disease or end-stage kidney disease.
The new study found that 4,757 COVID survivors had lost at least 30% of kidney function in the year after their infection, Al-Aly said.
That is equivalent to roughly “30 years of kidney function decline,” Wilson said.
COVID patients were 25% more likely to reach that level of decline than people who had not had the illness, the study found.
Smaller numbers of COVID survivors had steeper declines. But COVID patients were 44% more likely than non-COVID patients to lose at least 40% of kidney function and 62% more likely to lose at least 50%.
End-stage kidney disease, which occurs when at least 85% of kidney function is lost, was detected in 220 COVID patients, Al-Aly said. COVID survivors were nearly three times as likely to receive the diagnosis as patients without COVID, the study found.
Al-Aly and his colleagues also looked at a type of sudden renal failure called acute kidney injury, which other studies have found in up to half of hospitalized COVID patients. The condition can heal without causing long-term loss of kidney function.
But the VA study found that months after their infection, 2,812 COVID survivors suffered acute kidney injury, nearly twice the rate in non-COVID patients, Al-Aly said.
Wilson said the new data supported results of a study of 1,612 patients that he and colleagues conducted that found that COVID patients with acute kidney injury had significantly worse kidney function in the months after leaving the hospital than people with acute kidney injuries from other medical conditions.
In the new study, researchers did not directly compare COVID survivors with people infected with other viruses, like the flu, making it hard to know “are you really any sicker than if you just had another bad infection,” Sperati said.
In a previous study by Al-Aly’s team, however, which looked at many post-COVID health issues, including kidney problems, people hospitalized with COVID-19 were at significantly greater risk of developing long-term health problems in virtually every medical category, including cardiovascular, metabolic and gastrointestinal conditions, than were people hospitalized with the flu.
Every type of kidney impairment measured in the new study was much more common in COVID patients who were sicker initially — those in intensive care or who experienced acute kidney injury in the hospital.
People who were less ill during their COVID hospitalization were less likely to have lingering kidney problems but still considerably more likely than non-COVID patients.
“People who are at highest risk are the people who really had it bad to start with,” Al-Aly said. “But really, no one is spared the risk.”
The study also found that even COVID patients who never needed hospitalization had slightly higher risk of kidney trouble than the general VA patient population. But the risk seemed so small, Sperati said, that “I don’t know that I would hang my hat on” those results.
Wilson noted that some COVID patients who did not need hospitalization were nonetheless quite ill, needing to stay in bed for days. He said it’s possible that those were the ones who developed long-term kidney dysfunction, rather than people at the mildest end of the COVID spectrum.
Doctors are unsure why COVID can cause kidney damage. Kidneys might be especially sensitive to surges of inflammation or immune system activation, or blood-clotting problems often seen in COVID patients may disturb kidney function, experts said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
Ugh. I keep reading studies like this but no one tells you what you need to look at if you had Covid. Like specifically, what tests should my doctor be doing? I am having some kind of pulmonary function test but that is all, other than the stuff she runs every year.
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Unless there’s something you would do about it, there’s no particular reason to test. Especially if you don’t have any obvious symptoms. I mean, I guess you could ask your doctor whether it makes sense to test you for diabetes and kidney disease? If you had covid-induced diabetes you would treat it like any other diabetes. (I don’t think there is any particular treatment for minor kidney damage.)
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I kinda wondered about that too. But then you hear about these “silent” heart conditions. I dunno.
The test I’m having isn’t just bc of covid, although she said it’s not a bad thing to do after having Covid. I’ve had a cough for years that has been clinically diagnosed as cough variant asthma. But no testing has been done and I always wondered about that. When she described the test to me I finally understood why no one ever pushed it. But I’ve met my deductible and I’m having it this year. I think it will be good to know, once and for all, if I have asthma.
Incidentally allergy testing turned up NOTHING for me a few years ago, which is dumb bc I tested positive for several things as a kid. And bc I have year round allergy symptoms. This cough started after I cleaned an especially dusty corner of my house and it never went away.
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I think there would be reasons.
For example, i believe that advil can be hard on kidneys. This wouldn’t be anything to worry about for most of us. But maybe if your kidneys were damaged by covid.
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And perhaps people were taking a lot of Advil (or equivalent) while hospitalized for COVID. Do note that it’s hospitalized COVID people getting kidney issues, not ALL COVID people.
Yeah, I was wondering about that bc I was hospitalized. Wondered if it had to do with the drugs. Also if the length of hospitalization mattered. I was only in for 5 days, so a short stay for Covid pneumonia. And I was on that steroid for 10 days total.
If that hadn’t worked and I had needed stronger drugs for longer—is that the sort of thing that leads to kidney damage? Do people who are in the hospital for long periods of time for other reasons also have kidney damage?
I don’t think I was ever given ibuprofen while hospitalized for covid. I did ask for an allergy pill after a few days.
There were a bunch of early reports that advil might exacerbate covid. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a standard treatment for covid. I’m also pretty sure that people who aren’t hospitalized were more likely to be taking it than those who were, since it’s a good pain killer, and a lot of people have it lying around the house.