Author Interviews, Cognitive Issues, COVID -19 Coronavirus, Imperial College, Lancet / 28.07.2021
Brain Fog After COVID: Recovering Patients Underperformed on Cognitive Tests
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
[caption id="attachment_57832" align="alignleft" width="112"] Dr. Hampshire[/caption]
Dr. Adam Hampshire PhD
Faculty of Medicine
Department of Brain Sciences
Imperial College London
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: During 2020 I was leading a study that sought to map the distribution of cognitive abilities and aspects of mental health across the UK population. The study generated a lot of interest because it was a collaboration with BBC2 Horizon, leading to ~390,000 participants.
When the pandemic began to escalate in the UK a number of my colleagues at Imperial and elsewhere contacted me to note that the study could be used to investigate the impact of both the pandemic and direct illness on daily life, mental health and cognition. I had been thinking along similar lines so decided to add questionnaires about peoples' experiences with the pandemic and Covid-19 illness.
Dr. Hampshire[/caption]
Dr. Adam Hampshire PhD
Faculty of Medicine
Department of Brain Sciences
Imperial College London
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: During 2020 I was leading a study that sought to map the distribution of cognitive abilities and aspects of mental health across the UK population. The study generated a lot of interest because it was a collaboration with BBC2 Horizon, leading to ~390,000 participants.
When the pandemic began to escalate in the UK a number of my colleagues at Imperial and elsewhere contacted me to note that the study could be used to investigate the impact of both the pandemic and direct illness on daily life, mental health and cognition. I had been thinking along similar lines so decided to add questionnaires about peoples' experiences with the pandemic and Covid-19 illness.
Dr. Blumenthal[/caption]
Kimberly G. Blumenthal, MD, MSc
Massachusetts General Hospital
The Mongan Institute
Boston, MA 02114
[caption id="attachment_57828" align="alignleft" width="100"]
Dr. Krantz[/caption]
Matthew S. Krantz, MD
Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
Department of Medicine,
Vanderbilt University Medical Center,
Nashville, Tennessee
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: During the initial COVID-19 vaccine campaign with healthcare workers in December 2020, there was an unexpected higher than anticipated rate of immediate allergic reactions after Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. This prompted both patient and provider concerns, particularly in those with underlying allergic histories, on the associated risks for immediate allergic reactions with the mRNA vaccines.
Because of the significantly improved effectiveness of two doses of an mRNA vaccine compared to one dose, it was important to determine if those who experienced immediate allergic reaction symptoms after their first dose could go on to tolerate a second dose safely. 
Dr. Correa[/caption]
Andres F. Correa, MD
Assistant Professor
Department of Surgical Oncology, and
[caption id="attachment_57815" align="alignleft" width="150"]
Dr. Bernstein[/caption]
Adrien Bernstein, MD
Second Year Urologic Oncology Fellow
Fox Chase Cancer Center
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Unfortunately, it has been well-established that historically Black Americans experience increased cancer specific mortality compared to white patients. In prostate cancer specifically studies have shown that when access to care is equitable this gap resolves. This suggests that biological factors are not driving these differences but rather the result of the complex interplay of social determinants and systemic inequities in our healthcare system.
Early in the pandemic, multiple studies demonstrated that minority communities disproportionately shouldered poor COVID-19 outcomes. On March 13th 2020, the American College of Surgeons recommended against elective procedures; however, the definition of an elective oncologic case was left to the discretion of the provider. As prostate cancer treatment can be safely deferred up to a year follow diagnosis, management of prostate cancer during the initial lockdown period of the COVID-19 Pandemic provided a useful analysis of the differential restrictions placed on non-emergent health care during the Pandemic.
Dr. Els Broens[/caption]
Els M. Broens DVM, PhD, Dipl. ECVM, EBVS
European Veteirnary Specialist in Veterinary Microbiology
Associate Professor / Director VMDC
Department Biomolecular Health Sciences (Clinical Infectiology)
Faculty of Veterinary Medicine | Utrecht University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Several events have demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 can infect animals, felines and mustelids in particular. In companion animals these are currently considered to be incidents with a negligible risk for public health since the main force of the pandemic is transmission between humans. However, it is urgent to understand the potential risk of animal infections for public health in the later stages of the pandemic when SARS-CoV-2 transmission between humans is greatly reduced and a virus reservoir in animals could become more important.
Incidental cases have shown that COVID-19 positive owners can transmit SARS-CoV-2 to their dog or cat. The close contact between owners and their dogs and cats and the interaction between dogs and cats from different households raises questions about the risk for pets to contract the disease and also about role of these animals in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. Ferrara[/caption]
Michele Ferrara, PhD.
Professor of Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology
Chair of the Psychology Didactic Council
Department of Biotechnological and Applied Clinical Sciences
University of L'Aquila
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: During the current period of social distancing, the pervasive increase in the use of electronic devices (smartphones, computers, tablets and televisions) is an indisputable fact. Especially during the long lockdown period of Spring 2020, technologies played a pivotal role in coping with the unprecedented and stressful isolation phase. However, exposure to backlit screens in the hours before falling asleep can have serious repercussions on sleep health: on the one hand, by mimicking the effects of exposure to sunlight, and thus interfering with the circadian rhythm of the hormone melatonin, and on the other hand, counteracting the evening sleepiness due to the emotionally and psycho-physiologically activating contents.
In light of this assumption, we decided to test longitudinally during the third and the seventh week of lockdown a large Italian sample (2123 subjects) through a web-based survey. We assessed sleep disturbances/habits and the occurring changes of electronic device usage in the 2 hours before the sleep onset.
Dr. Navlakha[/caption]
Saket Navlakha PhD
Simons Center for Quantitative Biology
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, NY
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this algorithm? How does it aide in patient care?
Response: The machine learning algorithm helps to predict if and when a patient will develop severe COVID symptoms, based on information on how the patient presents on the day of infection. This could lead to improved patient outcomes, by getting a “heads up” on what may happen in the near future.
Dr. Peruvemba[/caption]
Ramani “Ram” Peruvemba, MD, FASA
Co-founder and CMO of HSR.health
MedicalResearch.com: Would you tell us about your background?
Response: I am a dual-board certified Anesthesiologist and Pain Management physician, currently serving as the co-founder and CMO of 
Prof. Papageorghiou[/caption]
Aris Papageorghiou MBChB, MRCOG
Professor of Fetal Medicine and the Clinical Research Director
Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute
University of Oxford
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Our study was really guided by a key question: does Covid-19 in pregnancy increase the risk of adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes as compared with pregnant women who do not have the infection?
The question is highly relevant because of the known deleterious effects of other coronavirus infections in pregnancy, e.g. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus).
In order to answer this question we undertook this multinational cohort study.
Dr. Hosie[/caption]
Margaret J. Hosie BVM&S, MRCVS, BSc. PhD.
Professor of Comparative Virology
MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
United Kingdom
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: SARS-CoV-2 is a new coronavirus of animal origin that recently jumped to humans and has spread rapidly across the world. It is likely that SARS-CoV-2 will establish as an endemic virus of humans, which has the potential to be transmitted to animals that live in close proximity to humans. There have been sporadic reports of infections in pet cats in households with COVID-19 patients, which demonstrates that cats are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and could act as virus reservoirs.
Dr. Blankson[/caption]
Joel N. Blankson, MD, PhD
Department of Infectious Diseases
Associate Professor
Cellular and Molecular Medicine Program
Johns Hopkins
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Which vaccines did you evaluate?
Response: Prior studies from several groups including our own have found T cell cross-recognition of peptides from SARS-CoV-2 and the common cold coronaviruses.
We asked whether as a result of this cross-reactivity, immunization with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would also enhance T cell responses to the common cold coronaviruses.
Prior studies also suggested that antibodies elicited from the mRNA vaccines had a reduced ability to neutralize the emerging variants of concern.
Most of the study participants had received the Pfizer vaccine, but a few had received the Moderna vaccine. 
Dr. Lashaki[/caption]
Masoud Jahandar Lashaki, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering
Florida Atlantic University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Toilet flushing can generate large quantities of microbe-containing aerosols depending on the design and water pressure or flushing energy of the toilet. Based on previous reports, a variety of different pathogens which are found in stagnant water or in waste products (e.g., urine, feces, and vomit) can get dispersed widely via such aerosolization, including the legionella bacterium responsible for causing Legionnaire’s disease, the Ebola virus, the norovirus which causes severe gastroenteritis (food poisoning), and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).
Based on previous reports, such airborne dispersion is suspected to have played a key role in the outbreak of viral gastroenteritis aboard a cruise ship, where infection was twice as prevalent among passengers who used shared toilets compared to those who had private bathrooms. Similarly, transmission of norovirus via aerosolized droplets was linked to the occurrence of vomiting or diarrhea within an aircraft restroom, as passengers and crew who got infected subsequently were more likely to have visited restrooms than those that were not infected. The participants in the study reported that all of the restroom surfaces appeared to be clean, which indicates that infection is likely to have occurred via bioaerosols suspended within the restroom.
Although many of these studies blamed flush-generated aerosols for disease outbreak, a limited number of them quantified the presence of such aerosols. Consequently, we decided to conduct this study to demonstrate the spike in aerosol concentrations following flushing. 
Dr. Bullard[/caption]
Jared Bullard MD FRCPC
Associate Professor, Departments of Pediatrics & Child Health and Medical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases
Max Rady College of Medicine
Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
Cadham Provincial Laboratory
Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Children are well known to transmit epidemic/endemic respiratory viruses like influenza. Initial public health policy was based on that children were likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 effectively within a community and subsequently in-person school and extracurricular activities were suspended.
Initial research did not show a clear association with children driving transmission. The purpose of our study was to take respiratory samples from both children and adults with COVID-19 (all had SARS-CoV-2 detected by RT-PCR) and compare those samples by their ability to grow in cell culture and amount of virus in samples.
We took 175 samples from children (97 younger than 10 years of age and 78 between 11-17 years) and compared them to 130 adult samples from the same communities in Manitoba experiencing outbreaks of COVID-19. 
Dr. Sickbert-Bennett[/caption]
Emily Sickbert-Bennett PhD, MS, CIC, FSHEA
Director, Infection Prevention, UNC Hospitals
Administrative Director, Carolina Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, UNC Hospitals
Associate Professor of Medicine-Infectious Diseases, UNC School of Medicine
Associate Professor of Epidemiology, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Recently public health officials have recommended doubling masks, although the 
