A UK trial tested three repurposed drugs for long COVID fatigue. Here's what happened.

Key Findings

Black Patients Are Being Underdiagnosed With Long COVID 🏥

• Analyzing electronic health records from 2.4 million U.S. patients infected with COVID-19 between January 2022 and March 2023, researchers found Black patients were less likely to receive a long COVID diagnosis than White patients — even when at least one documented long COVID symptom was present and healthcare contact was frequent.
• No other racial or ethnic group showed a statistically significant difference compared to White patients under the same conditions.

Your Brain Structure at 3 Months Can Predict Symptoms at 12 Months 🧠

• A longitudinal study of 144 non-hospitalized long COVID patients found that reduced grey matter volume in the right cuneus and superior frontal regions, plus thinner cortex in the left supramarginal gyrus at 3 months post-infection, were linked to worse executive function and greater fatigue a full year later.
• Brain-symptom associations strengthened from 1 to 3 months post-infection and were absent in 68 healthy controls — suggesting the pattern is specific to long COVID, not general post-viral recovery.

GLP-1 Drugs May Block Lung Scarring After COVID in Diabetic Patients 🫁

• In mice modeling type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 infection triggered persistent pulmonary fibrosis driven by pro-inflammatory macrophages — and treatment with a GLP-1 receptor agonist (the drug class behind semaglutide) significantly reduced that fibrosis by reprogramming macrophage responses, independent of blood sugar changes.
• People with type 2 diabetes also showed elevated fibrosis-related gene activity in monocytes that correlated with lung fibrosis biomarkers up to 3 months after acute infection.

Long COVID Leaves Measurable Marks on Muscle Function Over Time 💪

• A prospective longitudinal study found persistent, objectively measured impairments in muscle function in post-COVID syndrome patients, with those impairments tracking alongside symptom burden and markers of neuroaxonal injury — the kind of damage associated with nerve fiber loss.
• The study addresses a key gap: most long COVID severity measures rely on self-report, and objective biomarkers for disease trajectory have been hard to pin down.

Ivabradine Cuts Heart Rate in Post-COVID POTS — With a Catch ❤️

• A meta-analysis of 9 studies covering 245 patients found ivabradine reduced standing heart rate by about 18.5 beats per minute in people with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), including post-COVID subgroups, with a favorable side-effect profile and no reports of severe bradycardia.
• The catch: nearly all included studies were small and observational, heterogeneity was high, and the post-COVID subgroup results were among the drivers of that variability — so the signal is real but not yet solid.

Blood Clotting and Immune Disruption Are Tangled Together in Long COVID 🔬

• Comparing 21 long COVID patients to 24 asymptomatic controls, researchers found significantly reduced white blood cell counts, lower circulating monocytes, fewer platelets, and prolonged clotting time — then confirmed via transcriptomic analysis that key genes linking inflammation to clot resistance were sharply upregulated.
• The pattern points toward a state where monocytes stick to blood vessel walls instead of circulating, and the body's ability to break down clots is persistently blunted.