October 2025 Newsletter

The CDC estimates that around 4% of those with long COVID are older than 65 years. Many experts believe that this estimate vastly undercounts the number of seniors with long COVID because the symptoms may be confused with age-related conditions. Older patients may come into a doctor’s office or clinic with a heart problem like blood clots or kidney issues that are the result of long COVID but will be misdiagnosed as having a cardio or kidney problems.

Older adults with long COVID may need to transition to a greater level of care, such as assisted living or utilizing home caregivers, which results in higher health-related expenses. The financial impacts of long COVID are projected to last decades, but seniors who are retired and on fixed incomes don’t have time to make up the difference.

What doctors need to know is that without clear diagnostic tools, many older adults may experience long COVID without knowing they have the condition. They’re also enduring symptoms of early aging and the economic consequences that go along with it.

Even years after infection, most people who say they have smell loss do indeed have a dulled sense of smell when formally tested, scientists reported. Although it’s common for people to report this long COVID symptom, very rarely is it formally tested.
 
A team of researchers administered a scratch-and-sniff test to 3,000+ study participants. People tried to identify 40 different scents. It was found that after an average of two years post-COVID-19 infection, 80% of people who reported having altered taste and smell had trouble detecting scents on the test.
 
Researchers hope to continue performing smell tests on study participants to follow the trajectory of their recovery, as it is still unknown how long smell loss will last in these individuals.

Studies suggest that over 80% of people living with long COVID experience brain fog, which can make it difficult to work or handle daily responsibilities. A research team in Japan has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the cause of long COVID brain fog.

By comparing imaging data from long COVID patients and comparing to healthy individuals, researchers found a notable and widespread increase in the density of AMPARs (AMPA receptors) across the brains of patients. AMPARs are key molecules for memory and learning. The elevated levels are directly correlated with the severity of a patients’ cognitive impairment.

These findings provide a direct biological explanation for brain fog, highlighting a target for potential treatments. For example, drugs that suppress AMPAR activity could be a viable approach to mitigate brain fog in long COVID patients.

In the largest long COVID study of young people to date, scientists led by a team at University of Pennsylvania report that young people who got infected twice with COVID-19 were twice as likely as those who got infected once to develop long COVID symptoms.
 
The study involved data collected from more than 460,000 children, adolescents, and young adults who were diagnosed with COVID-19 in the beginning of 2022, with some who developed a second infection after that. At the end of 2023, researchers compared the group with one infection to the group with a second infection to discover these findings.
 
Researchers emphasize that getting vaccinated remains an important step in protecting against possible long COVID. However, the study shows that even if you’re vaccinated, reinfection poses a significant enough risk to double your chances of developing long COVID compared to just getting it once.
 
These results, along with other research, suggest that there might be a cumulative harmful effect of repeat COVID-19 infections in the body.

A new study aimed to examine mental health symptoms – depressive, anxiety and insomnia – in COVID-19 survivors with long COVID, and to explore their potential association with autoimmune activity. Of those observed, 57% with a history of COVID-19 infection reported having long COVID. In those with long COVID, 21.2% reported high proportions of depressive symptoms, 31.2% with anxiety symptoms and 28.7% with insomnia symptoms.

An association with all three mental health symptoms was made with autoantibody positivity, another term for autoimmune activity. These findings suggest that mental health symptoms are more frequent in long COVID patients who demonstrated symptoms of autoimmune disorders.

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