Watch our very own Dr. Roger McIntyre, the Chairman & Executive Director of the Brain and Cognition Discovery Foundation, as he explains more about Long COVID and why we are using Vortioxetine for our clinical trial!
Um so far over 200 symptoms have been described as part of covet so that’s a long drop down menu there are symptoms that are certainly more common like fatigue the brain fog we’ve been talking about i sort of think about this as a as a crime and we’re down at the police station there’s many suspects in the suspect line and i would say in that suspect line
Inflammation certainly is a suspicious character we we really think that what’s happening is what we call friendly fire in other words you got infected by covet your immune system has stepped up to the plate it’s helped you uh resolve the virus if you will in the sense of the acute viral infection that’s the good news but there’s a bit of friendly fire here
In other words what’s happened is the immune system has been so uh activated that unfortunately it remains activated for longer than we would like it to be and then on top of that uh the virus is largely under control this thing still this thing’s still stoked up so we’re seeing in fact collateral damage and what happens in the brain is that when the immune
System has been activated especially activated for a considerable period of time weeks and months we start to see some collateral damage in other words in the brain we’ve done some of this research ourselves we begin to see changes in certain parts of the brain and when we looked at this more closely we discovered that those areas of the brain where some of that
Damage takes place is exactly the area we depend on to think it’s exactly the same area we depend on for our energy our motivation and how much we enjoy life so it was a very interesting set of observations this is why we think inflammation is playing a role very very simply i sat back and i thought to myself what are the most common symptoms the most common
Not the only but some of the most common and really problematic symptoms amongst people having long coverage people have a lot of brain fog their mind’s just really foggy they just can’t think very clearly secondly people are just exhausted they’re fatigued they just have no energy and we don’t know what’s causing all of this but we think something about the
Immune system is playing some role so we went through our drop down menu of potential treatments we came up with this medicine for the oxygen why this one because this one has been shown to improve brain fog in other conditions it’s been shown to really improve energy and motivation in other areas has also been shown to really improve quality of life and function
And it’s an anti-inflammatory so we thought that’s really interesting so maybe we should actually test it and that’s why we chose this one in our study i would start off by saying that it’s complicated these things tend to be complicated indeed but we have begun to unravel some of the answer to that question and what’s interesting is that among other things
Vortioxetine affects chemicals in the brain that we know are really really important for cognition and cognition and really just refers to thinking it refers to your your processing speed in other words that pentium chip that’s in your head how fast you can process things and how sharp your memory is and how much you can pay attention all of that uh basic function
That we all know we depend on every day is cognition and vortioxin targets the neurochemistries now the neurochemistry is it’s a bit like a symphony at the toronto symphony orchestra there’s all kinds of instruments that are playing a role in the melody uh but we do know dopamine uh inflammation in other words it can reduce inflammation and there’s another one
Which is really important to the symphony called glutamate but the gist of it is these chemistries play a role in brain fog and cognition and motivation and so in many ways uh we sort of see 40 oxy as kind of a symphony it actually has different instruments that are touching on different tunes that create this really nice melody of improving cognition motivation
Energy and frankly at the end of the day quality of life and people’s function there’s always side effects in fact seventy percent of people get side effects on placebo side effects affects everything in life the question is is which side effects are common and what side effects you know kind of rain on the parade well we don’t see a lot of common side effects
But that’s one other reason we chose this one it has very few side effects you can get nausea but it tends to go away after a few days and it doesn’t really lead to discontinuation it’s not a few days it’s kind of annoying it goes away in some people who get it most people don’t get that uh so it’s one of the key reasons we did choose that one because it is quite well tolerated
Transcribed from video
Long COVID and Vortioxetine – Long COVID Research Webinar HIGHLIGHTS By Brain and Cognition Discovery Foundation
